hardware | Craig Hesling

Unified Altium Components Library for Lab

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 11:30:41 -0500

Description

Within a lab group, there is need to standardize on footprints used, since it takes such a large amount of time to create the footprints to begin with.

https://github.com/WiseLabCMU/AltiumLib

The GridBallast Controller

Sun, 03 Dec 2017 07:46:59 -0500

FIXME - Add the gallery line back here.

Summary

This is a modular demand response controller for household or commercial appliances that tend to consume a lot of power. The original goal was to intelligently control water heaters.

Water heaters tax the power grid heavily during peek times (morning and afternoon), when people are using the most hot water. These spikes in power consumption require power providers to plan ahead and preemptively start up temporary power plant that may not meet the typical efficiency and cleanliness standards.

Fortunately, water heaters store enough hot water for most normal household tasks, including taking a shower. Whether they turn on during your morning shower or not, makes no noticeable difference. Unfortunately, hot water heaters are controlled by mechanical switches that activate the water heaters when the internal water temperature drops below a certain point. This causes the heaters to activate during events like your shower in the morning, when it might not be necessary. If the water heater was to delay it’s activation to some random time during the middle of the day, we could alleviate this peak demand issue. This controller is designed to monitor the water heater vitals, observe it’s usage patterns, and intelligently control it’s activation.

Schematic and Board

The Controller

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The CTA2045 Adapter

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Simulation

This board required some custom analog design. I simulated some of the more complex circuits in LTspice. The circuits and simulation are shown on the GitHub Simulations Page.

The LoRaBug

Sat, 03 Dec 2016 07:46:59 -0500

Summary

The LoRaBug is a general purpose low-power sensor platform. It tightly integrates an ARM Cortex M3 based MCU, BLE, and a LoRa radio.

Checkout the Github repository for more detail.

Key Features

TI CC2650 MCU/Transciever - ARM Cortex M3, Bluetooth+BLE, and 2.4GHz 802.15.4
Semtech SX1276 radio - 137MHz to 1020MHz supporting LoRa, FSK, GFSK, MSK, GMSK, and OOK
Micro USB - Bootloading and Console
Onboard 500mA 3.3V regulator

Software

I have adapted the HAL of the official LoRaWAN stack for the CC2650 with TI-RTOS - LoRaWAN MAC
A spinoff from my example firmware can be found - LoRaBug_Firmware.
I have created a cross-platform serial bootloader tool that allows you to flash the LoRaBug using just a micro usb cable - ccbootutil

Schematic and Board

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Enlighten

Sat, 14 Feb 2015 07:46:59 -0500

This project focused on sending data to a mobile device using the camera.

Through the use of an off the shelf smart bulb, we were able to send location specific bits of data to an iPhone.

Hardware

We have chosen the $80 LIFX multicolored LED smart bulb. It has two ARM Cortex-M3 processors onboard to handle WiFI and 802.15.4 radios. What makes this bulb more appropriate for the project, as compared to the “CREE Connected” or the “Connected by TCP” bulb, is the fact that the onboard LED driver circuit is directly connected to the MCU IO pin and is capable of being PWM controlled. This allows us to send data using nothing other than frequency modulated light. The CREE and TCP bubs use a continuous current LED driver circuit that cannot be used without hardware modifications.

Software

The iPhone app used the Apple® Cocoa™ Touch library and OpenCV.

hardware | Craig Hesling

Unified Altium Components Library for Lab

Description

The GridBallast Controller

Summary

Schematic and Board

The Controller

The CTA2045 Adapter

Simulation

Links

The LoRaBug

Summary

Key Features

Software

Schematic and Board

Enlighten

Hardware

Software

Links