An interface to control your measurement setup in the lab - even if you are currently in a galaxy far, far away. RS232, TTL Input/Output and a RTC with ETHernet Board boost the Arduino / Genuino MEGA 2560.

It is no longer use to have a minor student come early and preheat the experiment. Nowadays (2019) the students control the experiment from home. So if they decide on a rainy sunday to work, the ramp-up process of the experiment can be started from home. And if our reasearchers show up on the scene after breakfast, everything is already running. As the Arduino/Genuino has not enough horsepower to handle https, you need a vpn connection to the university network. But thats only a small drawback :-)

The shield has a ST232CDR (or equivalent) which generates the ± 10 V from the 5 V. This is close enough to ± 12 V which is used to handle communication via RS232. The RX and TX are connected to RX3 and TX3 of the Mega 2560. By that, it does not intefer with the usb communication during development. (Can be jumpered to RX, TX for Arduino UNO). Via R11 (10 Ω) a phantom supply is available at Pin 4 of the DSUB.

A second form of communication is the I2C protocol. If you want to use it, a connector labelled "I2C" lets you access +5V, GND, SDA and SCL. (Pull-up resistors not populated).

If time is important, a DS1307 with a 32.768 kHz crystal, buffered by a 1 F capacitor offers a Real Time Clock with Calendar. It can be used for scheduled actions. The DS1307 offers the possibility to set alarms as well.

If you need TTL Input / Output, you can use Pin 8 and/or Pin 9. A series resistor of approx 100 Ω is recommended as a life-insurance :-)

If you want to interact locally, a Rotary Encoder is equipped as well. It is connected to A1, A2 and A3. As those pins are not capable of handling interrupts, you mayst use a timer interrupt to periodically poll the status of those pins.

For displaying status and other information, the device has an 4 x 16 character lcd.

The device is powered by a 7.5 V Wall Wart Power Supply. (e.g. GS06E-11P1J by Mean Well)

The complete device ... in a beautiful casing

The webmaster does not read these comments regularely. Urgent questions should be send via email. Ads or links to completely uncorrelated things will be removed.