Just wanted to pop up a quick thread and say 'hello world'. I finally ventured in to the Arduino world and picked up a "starter kit" this weekend. After watching Jeremy Blums tutorials on Youtube, I finally got some of the basics down. I finally got my head wrapped around the debounce function he wrote in some of his tutorials. I do have a few questions, thought. One, can the debounce method be done with hardware instead of software? I want to say when I took my semi-conductor courses back in the late 90's, that I could debounce a switch using a resistor and capacitor in parallel with the switch. Also, which might be a loaded question, but do any of you use the Arduino's in a production environment? I've got a few ideas that I would like to try, one is an temperature sensor/water sensor in our boiler rooms. While that one is not so critical, this next idea may be. I would like to try some of the flex sensors and line a wheelchair pad with them to detect potential falls in our nursing home. Thanks for any guidance!
Here is a hardware debounce circuit that works well for me. There are several temperature sensors available that are inexpensive and easily interfaced with Arduinos. As for the wheel chair, I would use a tilt sensor (accelerometer) to sense if a chair were tipped. For either project, if you provide more detail as to the goal(s), we can help with implementation.
Hi
That looks a very simple way of doing it and as you say it works well for you i will be giving it a try when debounce is required. Thanks.
Cheers
Bill
groundfungus, awesome I will try that circuit out tonight.
As for my projects, they will be a learning experience to say the least. I didn't think of the accelerometer, but the problem with that is that most of our falls are referred to as slide outs. My thinking is to use 6 of the pressure sensors (3 in the back and 3 in the front). This way if the resident is sitting to far forward, those back sensors won't be reading anything. I can use their resistance values, whatever they may be, to control sending a message to our CNA's.
As for the environmental, I've looked at TMP36 for the temperature portion, and using this water sensor:
http://www.emartee.com/product/42240/High%20Sensitivity%20Water%20Sensor
I will use the ethernet shield along with the libraries to display both values to our maintenance guys and then go from there as to how to alert them if the temperature goes over a certain value and if the water sensor senses water.