For anyone who enjoys watching machines do their thing as much as I do, here is a short video of the pick and place machine making Air Quality Egg shields.
Shield-PickandPlace from Wicked Device on Vimeo.
The large light colored rectangles are sockets to add additional sensors. The swish to the left is a nozzle change, so it can pick up the Attiny88 chip.
The Air Quality Egg shield was developed using the Nanode Gateway. If you purchased an egg shield only, and want to use it with an Arduino there are a couple of things you need to know. The most important of these is that the Nanode has a hardware MAC address, but the Arduino ethernet / ethernet shield does not. Instead, you have to set it in software, which for many reasons is very error prone and not ideal for things that are in production. Here is a thread about it. In my opinion this makes the Nanode much more Internet-of-things friendly than than the Uno.
The MAC address is a globally unique identifier which uniquely identifies the network connector. Each network card / unit in your computer has one and you can’t have two of the same MAC addresses on the same network. For us the important part is that the software which connects to Cosm uses this MAC address as the provisioning ID. This means that if you want to use Cosm you need to make sure that it is (a) Unique and (b) Always the same.
Alternatively you can just buy a Nanode Gateway.
Close followers of the Air Quality Egg project will have noticed that the indoor egg has no user controls, or for that matter any way to power it using a barrel jack. While not originally intended as part of the project, we felt it would be nice to be able to touch the enclosure and have an activity happen. A little bonus for our supporters who have waited so patiently. It also provides a good hacking opportunity for those who are so inclined.
This board provides power and a basic user interface, and will ship plugged into the indoor base station. It:
The design files are available on solderpad. This board is not yet in production, but of course we will be taking it there as soon as possible.
Simone Cortesi has created a really nice map showing what portion of the globe will be covered by the Air Quality Eggs. Mouseover to have each region hghilighted.
We are very close to having a final enclosure product, thanks to Albert’s tireless work. I think we are at revision 1,000 by now :).
This design has a number of advantages:
I think we are only a couple of revisions away from being done. This enclosure has been a great learning experience for me. It takes a long time and a lot of revisions to get it right. The bad news is that this will probably delay things, but I feel it is better to get it right and take a little longer.
Image credit Albert Chao.
Now that the Air Quality Egg has been funded, my goal is to post updates every couple of weeks, probably with the exception of the week around Maker Faire. If you have any updates that you feel I have missed, items that should be included, or corrections, please let me know.
Sensor boards: Vic has posted a first draft of the sensor board schematic on Github. All boards will be in Eagle. The free version will work fine. Be sure to download Eagle if you want to follow along.
Final unit counts: We still don’t have the final numbers of who ordered what. Kickstarter does not make it easy to get this, and Albert is doing yeoman’s work sorting it all out. Please respond if you get an email asking you what you ordered. We can’t finalize the costing and a timeline until all these numbers are in.
Enclosures: Albert has also initiated a discussion on the sensor enclosure on the AQE Google Group. Now is the time to speak up if you want to contribute.
Money: It takes two weeks for Kickstarter to pay out, and we have now received $131,500, which is the total raised less 9% in fees. Thank you once more!
That’s all for now.
Dirk