Wednesday, January 09, 2019

considered Rick's design

I remembered that London RASC member described a dew heater controller build project using an Arduino.

I was attracted to the design for its temperature and humidity sensing capabilities and considered that this might be a viable way to get into single-board computing field. I reviewed his article in the October 2014 edition of the Journal. The controller was also resilient to low voltage and offered computer control. But when I followed the web links, I got dead-ended. Reached out to the author Rick Saunders.

He quickly replied and said the unit "worked a treat." He warned about the heat generated in the controller affecting the DHT22 sensor. But then he relayed some bad news. He had suffered a hard disk crash losing a bunch of Arduino stuff.

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A few days later Rick shared the found sketch and VisualStudio project. But I had also hoped to receive a formal schematic (versus his diagram in the article) and maybe the board layout.

I was having second thoughts... Between the first contact with Rick and receiving the found files, I had decided against the Arduino path. I knew would be more expensive (not a lot but more) and (probably) extremely time-consuming with a lot of learning required. I wanted something very quickly. And really cheap. A basic unit would do.

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