Friday, May 6, 2011

PCB Development

Well Ive been busy with final exams lately, but what time Ive had has been devoted to creating custom Eagle libraries for all the parts for designing my PCB boards. Im almost done designing the Arduino Gas Shield and a Dual-Relay AC Power Shield (which uses G8P Relays from Omron). While the Gas Shield will be for the Active Fire Detection System, the Relay Power Shield (Powerduino v1.0) will be for AC power switching for lighting controls, as part of the Smart Home system. Once everything looks good, I think I'll upload both shield Gerber files to Batch PCB (and post the Bill of Materials here) for those of you wanting to buy the boards and build the kits yourself (I'll see if Sparkfun can carry these two also). 

For a future board, I tracked down a solid state MOSFET relay with a current rating of 2.5A that would be wonderful for a micro-sized DC Power board for use with the Teensy and Teensy ++. I'll design that when I have the opportunity. That would probably have a use in the alarms for the Smart Home System.

So there are many mini-projects going on simultaneously for the Smart Home System, as Im the lone person working on this. Hopefully I'll have something to show for all this work by Summer.

As an update on the Arduino/Efika side of things, Im having to reinstall Ubuntu on the Cloud server because of a glitch in the software thats now preventing me from having admin rights to edit anything. The Arduino Gas Sensor part of it is somewhat on hold until I sort out everything with the server. With all thats going on with my final exams, and the PCB boards (you can tell Im really bouncing around), I'll get to this when I get to it.

Stay tuned for updates.

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