Arduino Projects


Posted on Feb 5, 2014

Powerful for its size and cost, and extemely easy to learn and use. I spend a fair amount of time zipping around townon my scooter, and thought it would be cool to add a voltage monitor to warn when the battery might need recharging. Waiting until the electric starter no longer works is somehow lacking. So after an evening with an Arduino Duemilanove, I had a simple programmable voltage divider with 3


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LEDs indicating battery low, good, and charging. Done. That`s when I saw Liquidware`s very cool TouchShield Slide OLED display with touch screen. It was telling me it wanted to be on my scooter. It`s a bit overkill for just battery status, so I added temperature and time/date readouts. I went to Sparkfun and found a DS18B20 temperature sensor and a DS1307 RTC chip. Perfect. Oh wait, what`s this. an accelerometer Sweet! Hey, a GPS chip. You can see in the first photo that the TouchShield display is separated from the Duemilanove / Cell Module / Sensor shields. These are installed "under the hood" of my scooter and provide power and signals to the display module via a standard 8-wire ethernet cable. This keeps the sensors (accelerometer, GPS, cell module, etc. ) with the scooter making it functional even without the removable external display, as we`ll see later. (NOTE: this photo was taken before the display was fully mounted inside the enclosure, and is shown without the protective rubber boot. ) The sensors are mounted on a Proto Shield PCB from Ladyada`s Adafruit Industries (which is also where I get my Duemilanoves). Most of the wiring was done using 30 gauge Kynar solid wire, with heavier gauge used for some power and ground connections. Good mechanical connections are important considering the shock and vibrations this will be subjected to. I went with breakout boards for the surface mount chips. They take up a bit...




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