hanez.org

I got some samples from MAXIM some few days ago. Since I was busy studying other stuff I had no time to give them a try. Today I tried the DS1626 Temperature Sensor.

It was very easy to setup in the Arduino environment using the SoftwareSerial library. One problem I had was, that I was not able to write the temperture to my LCD display. I could not figure out why this happens. The LCD code didn’t worked anymore when including the SoftwareSerial header without using any functions of it…

Another problem for me was, that the DS1626 is being delivered in a SOP8 package and I for the first time needed to solder SMD. I used an adapter for SOP28 to DIP28 conversion because I wanted to place the IC on my breadboard. I soldered it successful and it worked right out of the box… ;)

Today I found a chip named LT1025. It is a Thermocouple Cold Junction Compensator from Linear Technology which is very easy to use for building temperature sensors for measurement and control and can also be used to convert a heat gradient into electricity.

It took about 5 minutes to get it working in the Arduino environment.

Just order some samples from Linear, they will send you one or two without charge… ;)

I am currently working me thru my box of microchips and other electronic stuff. I found some 74HC238 IC’s today and gave them a try. It was no very spectacular event but it’s nice to know what I have laying around when starting the next AVR project.

The 74HC238 is a high speed CMOS 3 to 8 line decoder which makes it possible to control 8 outputs with only 3 input lines. You will find more information and the datasheet at Sparkfun.

I used it to control 8 LED’s with my Arduino using just 3 output pins. Nothing worth to show you a photo… ;)

Rafael and I found this 7 segment LED display tonight while tinkering a bit. We didn’t knew what it is at first but after searching around the web we found out that it was a very vintage 7 segment LED display with 3 digits… ;) It is a HP 5082-7433.

I tinkered a little bit this evening and I have added a motion sensor to the Arduino platform. After that I added a network shield and have coded a small HTTP server… This server provides just a 0 or an 1. 0 if I don’t have moved around; 1 if I am dancing on the desk… ;) The sensor works with a radius of about 5 to 7 meters and it is really a lot of fun. You could get such sensors very cheap at ebay, just search for “arduino motion sensor”.

I am getting the status every second using wget and are displaying the output in xterm. It looks nice to see how much I am moving when writing this Blog post: