The main board looks good, but I’m not the expert needed to double check the work unfortunately 
The breakout board looks fine. Are we trying to keep the breakout to certain dimensions? Ie, are we getting all the boards manufactured on the same sheet or something?
It doesn’t need to be the same dimension, but it will fit nicely side by side on a board at presently.
As you may see I have 4 connectors poking out either side of the board, routing tracks shouldn’t be a issue so it’s free to move a few things around if you think it will help…
if its manufacturable, then it looks fine to me. Lets pull the trigger?
So we have a design for the boxes (thanks jimmy), we have electronics to
put in them (almost).
Shall we move on to how to control each door?
A) what was the final decision on the door latches, hinges and switches?
B) What will the master device be communicating with the other slaves? (I
could do a few red wire fixes on a slave and turn it into a potential
master to interface with another device)
C) All the other things like software and logging protocols and the like.
If we need another board made, it’s cheaper if I do it now as i can get
them all shipped together.
Otherwise I will send them out tomorrow to get made…
Sure thing.
Well, we need to buy solenoids. Thats about $100 spend right there. I don’t have that cash spare at the moment, do you? We could apply for all our backdated cause money but thats a dicey proposition.
As for the master controller; The plan was, to some extent, to use an arduino + cheap tablet ($150 budget). But after our conversation last night perhaps we’d be better off with some sort of cortex whatever and a screen. Thoughts? Essentially something with enough grunt to run a lemp stack.
Software wise, 90% of it will probably be your traditional web technologies stack, with a bit of glue in order to send out the right serial data. I can probably start knocking some of that out now to some extent.
I don’t think any of this is a blocker for getting boards made so lets make that happen. A lot of these details mentioned above I think we will blast through in a day of ‘lets sit down and piece this all together’
can you order one solenoid of the desired type so I can use it for testing?
I have emailed the board design to the manufacture, waiting on response.
Also ordered 10 solenoids as they come in a pack of 10…
Soldering party anyone?
When do you want to have a hacking session to put it all together luke? I’m free on the weekend more or less I think…
There is one problem with the board as it stands at present.
They didn’t cut a grove to snap them… 
So I was going to have a go at cutting them this weekend on Seppo’s CNC…
Ah right. That should be solvable with a cnc or a scrollsaw or somesuch.
Let me know how you go and we might have an assembly session on sunday or
something.
Just did a test cut on the CNC and it couldn’t have gone better.
Might solder a board up as a example and for a quick test tommorow morning…
Sunday sounds good…
Ha! found this code floating around on the net…
I think this will do what we want!
We have purchased 40 hinges for 85 c each as a start from bunnings so they are easy to source. Just need a limit/reed switch and an idea of the hole you want in the back of each of the boxes so I can do drawing.
There is a place for a reed switch on the board, it doesn’t have to be used
if someone comes up with a better solution or if mounting it is a pain.
Both Luke and I are flat broke at the moment. If you can chip us some money to keep this rolling, come talk to us. We’re pretty much stalled until we get more funds.
So I did a quick design on the laser on friday that is essentially the square door with some tabby bits on it to pin into the top/bottom of the box. It works great, but its not amazingly hard wearing. I was thinking about reinforcing with some other materials and some washers, but going down that path I thought, why not a bit of round alu stock with a slot in it? its certainly cheap enough, the ‘hard part’ is milling a slot in such stuff, which is just waiting on the mill to get going. but that would work amazingly, and be extremely hardy, not have any wastage. It’s slightly trickier manufacturing wise, but its probably the simplest mill operation possible.
Why not standard hinges? If you havent been following along with us, hinges are usually expensive, and they’re just flat out tricky to get right in this situation and our parameters for stacking.
So, I’m currently advocating either laser cut panels, or doing a slotted alu solution.
Current stack will be a L*MP implementation on the android tablet, running in a kiosk mode. The iBoard and Tablet will communicate via HTTP, the iBoard and IGOR’s will communicate via RS485.
IGOR’s are dumb, their protocol is literally [{output: <n>, mode: <q>, value: <v>},...]. This allows only flashing of the iBoard in order to upgrade functionality.
Taking a tool:
Reporting breakage:
Returning tools:
We’re super close, but we’re lacking in funds. If you can pitch in to help us get this done, come talk to us. All the details are more or less worked out, with the right tools and the right materials, we could knock this out in a day.
I’ve put aside an iboard for you guys, do you still need RFID readers?
Yep, will need one for the iBoard to talk to. We’ll be knocking together a
custom shield for the iboard so it can do rfid, rs485 etc.
