I am working on a project for controlling a fairly large powder coat oven which includes eight heat zones with a total of ten oven elements throughout the oven. The oven is expected to operate in the 300-400 Degrees Fahrenheit range. I am looking to create an interface from a shop computer that would allow me to monitor the temperatures of each heat zone, and allow me to control which elements are powered on and off through information feed back to the computer program through the use of a Arduino Mega 1280 Board. I am looking at using J-thermocouples in each heat zones connected with max6675 digital converters feeding back to the Arduino board, to get the temperatures of the heat zones. I am thinking of using an IRFZ44 MOSFET transistor to interface the Arduino, to the OMRON 24v Relays that are used to control the elements on or off state now. My question about the project is to find out if anyone else has experience doing something similar to this where Arduino is used primary as a live gateway of information and control based on the logic passed from an interface program communicated through the USB port on board of the Arduino with some active examples.
Thank You for the suggestion! It sure does offer a lot of what I am looking for... I loaded the sketch for firmata, and ran the test program from them... I sure wish I could find some of the source code for the test program so I can see exactly how they are communicating with the board. It does offer the exact amount of control that I am seeking to have.
I thought that I had the temperature measuring side under control using the max6675 chip with arduino. I am not so sure any more. I need to be able to monitor the temperatures up to 250 celsius in eight zones of the oven.... Do you have any suggestions on how I can do this?
I have been looking at that exact website and trying to understand how that would work if I was to use two of them.. How do you go about connecting two of those to the Arduino Mega board and would I still have another 8 outputs left in order to switch on and off my relays? I like the idea of using two of them.. I am just not certain I understand How yet. Looking at the customer service on the website, Its not written in a language that I am familiar with, so I am not getting much help from there.
As for the Firmata, does anyone know if there is any visual c++ code out there I can view to see how it interacts with the board?
I would think that you would have plenty of pins to control other things without even using a Mega board. If you don't have 8 individual pins, you can rather easily use a shift register to provide a great many more outputs. See: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ShiftOut
I have been looking into this for a couple hours.. I am trying to understand how these work.. I ordered twenty of the ones from the tutorial to experiment with, but the examples lead me to believe that the LEDs they have connected would operate all at once, or nothing at all. I am not lead to believe I could turn on each LED individually and operate them independently like I want to operate each of my Oven elements. Is that the case in your experience with them? Either way thank you for the suggestion it certainly is providing me another avenue to follow and discover new ways to handle situations.