Saturday, January 11, 2014

Hacker Dojo Reflow oven... take 2

Last week the new reflow oven at the Hacker Dojo took a bit of a turn as the controller board went missing. There has been a lot of searching, but it's still gone, so I brought in a second one just so the oven will get back to operational status.

This one is a standalone controller, with pin clips leading off to an AdaFruit RGB LCD shield. It's a bit of a hack.

In case the pin clips get disconnected, the four pins on the controller's 4 pin SIP header are (starting at the top) ground, +5v, SCL and SDA. On the AdaFruit shield, you need to connect ground to the second or third pin of the power section of headers. +5v is connected to the fourth pin. SDA is the second to last pin on the digital side of the shield, and SCL is the last pin. Note that these are the two "extension" pins of the Uno rev 3.

The button to push to start the oven is the "SELECT" button on the LCD shield. It's the one that's immediately to the right of the pod of "directional" buttons (four arranged in a "+" for up, down, left and right).

The display is a bit difficult to read, but you can see gross status by looking at the color of the backlight. Yellow is "waiting" state, and green means that the oven is running through a cycle. You could just load the oven, push the button, and wait for the display to turn yellow again.

The next batch of boards from OSH Park will contain the new design of the backpack controller. I'll put one of those together and set that up as soon as I can. That design should be similar to the missing controller - a simple white backlit LCD module with a start button on the back. Hopefully before too long someone will be able to use the 3D printer to make a nice box for it.

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