Category: Uno32

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Ebay Listing

We have finally got round to starting to add some products to ebay, all laser cut of course. Ebay shop. So far we have quite a few home decor items which are great but the most interesting item is a Breadboard Component Holder.

More after the break


After getting fed up of bent pins on our breadboard compatible components (being of the “stick it in the box/drawer” school of tidy) we decided to come up with something that we could use to store these items. We now have a few of these on walls and desks and in one case on the side of a PC!

With a couple of male headers we can use them to store dev boards like the Stellaris Launchpad, Chipkit and of course Arduino!


We even use them to store ICs like this L293D Motor Driver


Only problem we have is that it takes quite a while to laser drill the six thousand two hundred and nine holes!


You can get one here – Breadboard Component Holder

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Fire Detector 2

So I set up the Chipkit Uno32 with the temperature sensor TMP36 from oomlout.com, installed the serial port monitor on the laser pc and tested the system. All fine so far.




The data collected was pretty good as well.



The left shows room temp with the slight increase being the heat detected from my hand on the outside of case. The peak is where I took a very technical approach and waved a lighter under the sensor!


Unfortunately as soon as I turned the laser on it all went wrong! The data became massively noisy as you can see here:


The flat bit in the middle is where I turned the laser off. 

The laser is not running, just sitting in ‘standby’. The only thing running is its controller and the steppers in a fixed position.

First thing I did was swap the USB port to a different PC, just in case, but no improvement. I also ensured that the Uno32 was not shorting on the body of the laser.

Next I turned off the laser but left all the cooling and extraction on, this gave good data!

So in summary, the laser is interfering with Uno32 / temp sensor despite them being isolated from each other. Great. I will try increased insulation and moving the Uno32 off the machine somewhere.

If anyone has any suggestions (or something really obvious I have missed) please let me know!