justDIY Project Log

Thanks to the folks at Make: and Hack A Day, my research into the area of using LEDs as sensors has been receiving a lot of attention. With this attention comes questions. I like receiving questions. Only thing I don’t like about answering questions in the e-mail is the knowledge is locked up. Sure I could repost the e-mails, but it is sometimes difficult to follow the context after the thought train has left the station. With my rekindled interest, I wanted to take a short moment and summarize a few things.

These are just my opinions – and I welcome debate and feedback on them – I especially welcome anyone to be challenged by them enough to prove me wrong. LEDs as Sensors offer at least two avenues of usefulness; communications and interface. I haven’t dipped even a toe into the communications side of the pool – all my work has been on interface.

These are the applications I feel LED Sensors are a poor fit to replace:
#1 – The touchpad on your notebook. Seriously, no one but a geek would enjoy having 128 or more bright LEDs glowing continuously to replace the little capacitive discharge pad that is used 95% of the time today.

#2 – The keys on your keyboard. LED sensors are pretty slow, even a modest typist would be hindered by the response time.

#3 – Any application that needs to work outdoors. LEDs and the Sun do not get along.

These are the application I feel LED Sensors may work well in:
#1 – Keypads and interactive displays used for Art and Music. These applications fit the ostentatious nature of the interface, where the controls are as much a work of art as a functional device.

Yep, that is it… that is the only application I think LED Sensors offer any strength in.
Here is an example – Musician / DJ sound effects tablet:

Imagine a thin tablet like device, glowing brightly with powerful LEDs in an otherwise darkened club / dance hall / etc. The tablet accepts an ordinary 8×11 sheet of transparency film. Printed on the film are the names of pre-programmed effects / samples /whatever. Under the film, evenly spaced trios of LEDs are used to detect the presence of a reflective object. The tablet connects into the rest of your system using regular MIDI or whatever other interface one can think of. This tablet is no different than boxes hobbyists and musicians have been building or buying for years, except, the mechanical switches have been replaced with eye catching LEDs.

Here are a few other questions that have been raised:

Q: Do I have to use red LEDs?
A: No, technically any LED color works. Red is the cheapest and that is what I use. Along with yellow, red is almost the most sensitive.

Q: I tried IR LEDs and they seem very sensitive, why not use those?
A: The point of using LEDs as Sensors is to have an ostentatious interface. It’s not going to be very showy if the light is invisible. If you want to use infrared LEDs, use one emitter and one photodiode / phototransistor – it is a LOT easier.

Q: Does this work with organic / flexible LED displays?
A: I have no idea. Those displays are largely theoretical and prototypical in nature – maybe in five years when I can buy one for a few dollars, I’ll experiment with it. The organic compounds used to manufacturer these displays also have big problems with humidity and overall short lifespan – neither are very positive traits.

Q: Can you send me your ASM code for such and such?
A: No, no I can’t. I do not have any ASM code – I do not know how to program in assembler. I have code written in Proton Basic, which I will happily share.

Q: I want to get started with microcontrollers?!
A: Excellent – I’m not going to help you. There is a huge learning curve involved – a lot of it can be skipped by spending money (on proton basic). Check out www.sparkfun.com and www.crownhill.co.uk for good microcontroller stuff. Check out google.com for tons of info on learning microcontrollers.

Q: What microcontroller do you recommend?
A: I like the new PIC16F690 family from Microchip. It is a small inexpensive package that offers many features only found on larger processors (like dedicated i2c hardware). It also sports at least 10 ADC ports.

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In closing, I would also like to share some basic info on what I’m working on at the moment. My current project is to get a stand alone system worked out for emulating mechanical switches. I consider this a valuable “core” building block behind the technology. I have momentary switches partly working, after that, a toggle switch shouldn’t be much harder. As a future goal, I would like to get “cores” built to emulate sliders and knobs. Those three elements should cover a great deal of the artistic / musical needs that I feel this technology is well suited for.

Thank you for visiting and I welcome your comments. My gmail is gordonthree – feel free to contact me about anything.

The old adage “measure twice, cut once” has a realitve in the field of electronics engineering; “measure twice, design once” … ok, well maybe that’s a bit corny but anyway.

Turns out the controller I designed for my water filter is pretty much useles. My filter’s pump is not the 12vdc that I imagined it to be, instead, it is 24vac. So the two smt mosfets which I soldered to my pcb with generous amounts of solder, are not capable of switching AC. Worse, I had planned to power the controller itself off the psu for the pump, so the 7805 vreg I’m using will not appericate AC on its input terminals either.

I plan to salvage this situation however… using relays, either mechanical or electronic, as well as a separate power supply. So, I will use a ~12 volt unregulated supply to power a pair of mechanical relays, one for the pump, one for the valve, which in turn will be switched by the mosfets. Or, I can desolder / destroy / jumper over the mosfets, and run a +5v control signal to my outputs, for control of a solid state relay.

I need to price out the cost of mechanical vs solid state …. probably solid state will win, I think I can build a triac based ssr for under $2.

As a fan of taking my dihydrogen monoxide in straight, uncut, uncorrupted liquid form, I purchased a six stage reverse osmosis filter some years ago.

My filter is a few years old now, and the super calcium enriched water we have in Michigan has taken its toll. The filter used to shut off when the production tank was full. However, the filter has recently developed a leak in the auto shutoff valve, so it’s constantly consuming water, even if the pressure tank can’t hold any more. This leak started slow, and I could live with it. In a few months, it had sped up to wasting a considerable amount of water. So, rather than replace the auto shutoff valve, which would have been too easy, I decided to add a microcontroller instead. The other problem my filter has, I discharge the brine water out to storage tanks next to my house, which hold the waste water, for watering plants and other uses. Problem is, when the temperature gets too low, the discharge line can freeze, which is very bad for the filter. So my microcontroller solves this problem as well.

The mcu is performing a few simple logic operations, with a few twists. First, it checks to see if the pressure tank reads “high” or “low”, via a pressure sensitive switch. If the tank reads “low”, that is the first “1″ in my logic comparison – a simple AND operation. Second, the mcu checks to see if the outdoor ambient is above 38°F. That is my second “1″ in the AND operation. If the pressure is low and the temp is good, a flag is set to enable the boost pump and water supply valve. A timer detects this flag and begins a countdown of 30 seconds (roughly). I chose to use a timer to buffer any false readings that may occur for whatever reason. After the 30 seconds has elapsed, the mcu turns on two mosfet switches, controlling the current for a solenoid valve and the boost pump. The mcu continues to monitor the two variables of the AND operation, if either changes, the “make water” flag is cleared, and the mcu turns off the water supply valve and the boost pump.

(click for super-sized version)

Two N-Channel mosfets control the current for the boost pump and the solenoid valve. The valve is a 24VAC lawn sprinkler valve, but I have tested it and it works well on 12vdc. The boost pump is a 100 gpd, 100 psi diaphragm pump, which delivers slow but steady high pressure water for optimal membrane operation. Pull-down resistors R3 and R7 are provided to prevent mosfet self-destruction should something happen to the microcontroller. The connectors TEMP, PRES and DISABLE are pin headers for connecting to external transducers. For reading temperatures, I chose the Dallas DS18B20 high precision digital thermometer with 1-Wire interface. The pressure switch is a simple normally closed pressure sensitive switch that opens around 45 psi. It is wired to present the PIC with a logical “1″ when the pressure is low. The disable connector will be connected to a shut-off switch, allowing me to temporarily halt production. The LEDs are just for indication of various operational conditions and modes. A 7805 regulator provides the pic with 5v from the 12v supply for the pump and valve.

Rather than cobble this together on protoboard, I made up some PCBs real quick. Here is a top view of the controller, without any connections, except for the thermometer. When installed, the thermometer will be installed at the end of a ~10ft shielded cable, for sensing the ambient temperature near my water storage tanks.

Here is the messy solder side of my controller. I haven’t hosed it down with alcohol yet to clean off the flux. I waited till it was good and late before soldering anything, so some of those joints are pretty nasty – I apologize.

(click to download full res)

The PCB layout was pretty easy – I had a lot of room to work with, as the enclosure I have selected is pretty big. This image shows the parts layout, along with the bottom copper artwork. The top layer artwork (in red) is for two jumper wires. Clicking on the above layout will get you a 300 DPI monochrome TIFF of the bottom layer artwork. Print this out at 300DPI and you should have a 1:1 scale of the pcb, incase anyone wants to make their own. Hit the contact justDIY link on the side menu if you want the firmware source code – it is written in Proton Plus basic.

This idea was shared with me on the electro-tech-online forums, and I made up some graphics to help myself and others understand it.

The first step involves choosing your illuminator LED – this diode will provide light for nearby sensors to ‘see’.

The second step is to reverse bias a nearby LED, preparing it to be the sensor. A diode in an adjacent row and column must be selected, to avoid electrical interference from the illuminator.

The third step is reading the voltage present on the cathode terminal of the diode, which indicates the light level the sensor detected.

The controller can then choose another nearby diode to use as a sensor, or move on to another pixel in the array, repeating the entire process.

One of these days, I’ll get around to re-wiring my house, however there are a number of obstacles in the way … the largest being the 2ft of clearance between my crawlspace and my floor joists.

Along with plenty of 20a rated outlets to go around and ethernet glaore, one thing I’d like to have is music in every room, well, nearly every room. I’d especially like to have audio in the kitchen, work shed (attached), bedroom and dining room. The bedroom would be a special case, I’d like to have the audio system, and an additional thin/fat client for full AV usage.

My idea for the audio system revolves around using a linux server. Here’s the basic idea … each room would have a small LCD screen and some buttons (or maybe old pda’s?). So I’ll call that the interface, whatever it ends up being. Each interface will be able to select the source (perhaps four or five source channels, whatever I can get away with, plugging cheap sound cards into my linux box). If the source is digital, i.e. mp3, the interface should be able to pause playback, next track, previous track, random track. The interface would also need to present a pre-programmed list of Internet radio stations (my main source of music, I have a very small cd/mp3 collection). In the case of internet radio, the interface should let me select the previous station, next station, random station, play, pause, etc. When using a live source, cable, tivo, etc, I dont want to mess with an inter-device interface, so, the only option would be mute. For any source, the interface will also provide a local volume control.

MPG321 and the linux kernel modules apparently have support for multiple DSP audio devices, so a rather simple script should allow for a specific input (file or live) to be routed to a specific output. For mixing of sources, that is, two rooms want the same source, I plan to use a series of analog multiplexors, designed for just this application. These simple ICs can be controlled by the server, and connect specific analog ouputs to specific analog inputs. For example, a 8 channel mux arranged as 2×4 will allow a single stereo output to select from a choice of four inputs. So one IC is required for each stereo output, allowing each source channel to select any of the four sound cards as inputs. A similar IC setup would be used to allow the sound cards to share live-output sources (tivo, cable) as inputs, connecting their line-input to any live source available.

I’m not sure about distribution. I could either go with matching transformers, and send line level signals over cable to the room, and use local amplification… or, I could go with central amplification and just use some heavy speaker wire to drive speaker jacks in the rooms. My house isn’t huge, so there wouldn’t be any runs more than 50-70 ft, so inexpensive 14ga speaker wire should serve nicely … I’m not looking for killer sound while I’m stir-frying … just want to be able to hear the tv or shoutcast stream without having to blast my stereo at the opposite end of the house. The advantages I see of central amps, I can build up a big power supply using old computer psu’s, and drive inexpensive car-audio DC amps, one for each source. The server could control the power to the amps, turning off unused sources. Secondly, line level signals are really low voltage… trying to send them over a long run of wire seems to be asking for trouble … unless I use something expensive like RG58 or RG6. Local amplification also means I need to locate an amplifier somewhere in the room, and provide power for it … not that big of deal I suppose.

This project is a long ways off, but its something that keeps crossing my mind, so I figured I should write it down.

Later!