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Cumbria Group Meeting Friday 9th October

 Although this was only a coffee and chat meeting, eleven members joined us for an interesting session which basically covered what was on our workbenches. Some members suffered from technical gremlins on the Zoom session but hopefully they will have that sorted for next time.

Andy Woolass had volunteered to be a guinea pig for building the latest version of an EzyBus Input Module. It was a fairly straightforward build but the lack of sufficient ground points for external connections was a suggested improvement.


The original Input board which used an MCP23017 Module was originally supplied by Davy Dick for £2.

Members trying to build their own using a provided PCB, sometimes fell foul of the different form factors of this Module which caused obvious fitting problems. It is for this reason the PCB has been redesigned to accept a more standard 28 Pin DIL device. The Kit will be available in the Kitlocker, but at £7.20 it is a little expensive.

Various members showed Arduino development boards that are currently available from Ebay and other sources and Andy Robb showed a PCB for Arduino Nano development with a straight through I2C connection making it easy to daisy chain other boards. It also had servo drive connectors, ULN2003 outputs and motor outputs. In addition it had connectors for up to two Bluetooth Modules that would allow control of the board from a PC, smartphone or tablet.

Their were discussions ranging from green screens, shuttles, sheds and even Nuclear Power. 

The North Wales group have a Shuttle Project for beginners. If you are interested, join the North Wales Area Group to find out what they are up to.

Already looking forward to the next meeting.

Comments

  1. Andy1878October 12, 2020 at 8:56 PM

    Could you post a URL for the Nano development board please

    ReplyDelete
  2. Scottish Borders Area GroupOctober 13, 2020 at 3:33 PM

    The board is not available directly from the designer. Instead he makes the gerber files available so that you can make your own arrangements to have them manufactured.
    I paid for ten panels to be made. Because of the strange size you only get one circuit per panel so that makes them about £1 per board. I certainly wont be using ten so if anyone needs one - just give me a shout I'll do a write up when I get my first sketch written with relevant links to the site

    ReplyDelete

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