Picaxe Far & Wide

[Mark.R]

Just a social post for where people are in the world, if your working on anything interesting at the moment in these (as they say) strange times and things like the day job?

I'm in Shrewsbury which is the county town of Shropshire in the west midlands of England not far from the boarder with Wales. I'm currently working on expanding my knowledge to eventually building and programming a controller for running my multi-source heating system. I'm an electrical maintainer and instrument tech for the local water company.


Mark

 

[Solar Mike]

Wellington, NZ: Here is my interesting project coming up in the next few months; a heating system for plant propagation.
Water is heated by 30 m^2 solar hot water panels and stored in a 1000 Liter tank, this supplies a smaller tank for circulating warm water through the root zone of new plants. Picaxe controls everything.


Temperature sensors are DS18B20 multiplexed to a single cpu pin, various magnetic drive pumps driven by mosfets.

PCB Top:


Bottom:


Will be interesting to get it all going.

Cheers
Mike

 

[lbenson]

Nice PCB, Mike, as always. Do you make your boards or have them made in China? What design software do you use?

Can you provide a link to your pump motors?

 

[Mark.R]

Hi Mike,

All sounds very good and I second Ibenson, lovely looking PCB. I've been dabbling with KiCAD which I've found very good as lots of helpful videos on YouTube, I've even now made schematic symbols of most of the Picaxe chips.

I hope it goes well.

 

[Solar Mike]

Nice PCB, Mike, as always. Do you make your boards or have them made in China? What design software do you use?

Can you provide a link to your pump motors?

Software is paid version of DipTrace, have been using this for a couple of years, after most recent updates its quite good and easy to use.
I used to make (etch) my own pcbs, but as I use mainly surface mount components now and have lots of via's, its much easier to get a Chinese PCB manufacture to make them, I use JLCPCB.

Pumps:
The best DC magnetic drive hot water circulation pumps are the Brass ones made in the USA by Ivan Labs, I have a couple of these that have been running 8 hrs per day for the past 12 years, with no problems; but they are expensive.

Next best are the 12VDC hot water circulation pumps used in vehicle auxiliary heating, Davies Craig are a good brand.

Lastly are the DC pumps from AliExpress; I have some and they work, but for how long....

Cheers
Mike

 

[lbenson]

Thanks, Mike. Good info.

I've had a number of boards (EagleCad) made by JLCPCB, and recently had the first one populated (design by others, gerbers posted on internet). DHL charged an additional $39.93 for "customs clearance".