I’ve been finalizing the prototyping stage of the Arduinoven, and I’ve discovered something that’s pretty obvious to someone who has worked with thermocouples before.  Not obvious to me though, until now.

 Been a while since I’ve posted about the Arduinoven project I’m working on.  I’ve got a prototype PCB laid out, which is of the appropriate form factor to fit into a Sparkfun Project Case.  The board is a two-layer design, with all through-hole components.  I’ve adjusted the design to use a MAX232 RS232 converter instead of the discrete component RS232-to-TTL adapter (this saves a little space and makes soldering easier).  The full feature list appears below.

I picked up a BMP-085 barometer breakout board for my quadcopter last week.  I decided to pick up one because the new AeroQuad 2.4.2 code is able to be compiled to support altitude hold and be able to fit on an Arduino Uno.

Last weekend I assembled a few breakout boards for things I’m going to need to be able to prototype my Reflow Oven project.  Namely, I needed a DB9 RS232 breakout board, a DIN-5 breakout board, and a 5v power supply.  Schematics and board layouts (fixed versions!) can be found at my GoogleCode repository.

When you buy a brand new, blank ATmega328p, it comes with a set of fuses (basically hardware settings) which give it maximum reliability, but they aren’t the default that is required for the chip to work with the Arduino IDE and libraries.  In order to burn the correct fuses onto it, run the following command (this assumes that you’re using Arduino-as-ISP on COM4);

Now that I’ve got the MCE Remote all built and in service (works quite nicely!), I need a new project.  I’m interested in getting involved in surface mount devices.  The reason for this is threefold - there are certain devices that aren’t available in through-hole packages, when using SMT you can typically make a board a lot smaller, and lastly individual SMT components not on breakout boards are typically a LOT cheaper than the already-soldered part.