UI Shield

Some more news on the Egg: Here is the UI shield. It plugs into the base station, and has a capacitive touch sensor, a switch (not used in the egg) and a bright RGB LED. And boy is that LED bright. It also has a barrel jack.

Bad design at it’s most brilliant

I came across this at the local Dick’s Sporting Goods. How are you supposed to scan the card?

It was on a pivot, but unfortunately was so close to the shelf on the right that is was not able to do more than wiggle a little from side to side.

Air Quality Egg #1

We produced the hardware for Air Quality Egg #1 yesterday.

This is the base station, remote unit and AQE shield. The base station is the one with the Ethernet jack installed.

Followers of the project might notice that this looks remarkably similar to the units produced over a month ago, and that is correct. That’s the difference between “working in the lab” and “working ready for production”. It might not look it, but that is a significant difference 🙂

These will be ship in the egg enclosure. Also, the sensors have been removed for clarity.

New board: Power/ UI shield

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:

• gives the egg 7-12V barrel jack power.
• interfaces with the CapSense capacitative touch library. The aim is to be able to control the egg just by touching the outside.
• It also has a backup a tactile switch, which will not be populated unless the final enclosure does not work with capacitive touch.
• and finally, interfaces with an RGB LED

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.

Where are the Air Eggs going?

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.

Nanode video by Mark VandeWettering

One of our customers, Mark VandeWettering, has a pretty nifty video of the Nanode acting as a webserver to change LED strip colors. The blog post is here.

More enclosure action … very close to final

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:

• A fan will be installed (Blue box) to ensure consistent airflow across the sensors.
• The shape at the bottom means that putting it upright on a table won’t kill the fan. It also has a very nice pleasing curve to it. So while it is intended to lie flat on it’s side, it can be upright if needed. By design, it will rest upright at a slight angle.
• There is space for the Ethernet cable to plug into the top of the shield, and wrap around to exit out the bottom.
• We can use a single enclosure for both the inside and outside eggs. the indoor egg will not have a fan installed, and that space will be open.

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.

Revised enclosure

This is what the latest enclosure looks like. A little thicker, a tiny bit larger, and still oozing sex appeal. The same enclosure will be used for both the indoor and outdoor egg.

A huge shout out to Albert Chao, who has carried the torch on the design, and created this.

This is the injection molded enclosure we are considering. There is another design for a laser cut version, which was used in the Chicago Hack.

The good news is that we are honing in on a really nice product which we think people can put on their coffee table. The bad news is that we are now behind schedule (to be clear, our fault, not Albert’s).

Add on Boards: O3, VoC’s

Recently we prototyped the add-on boards for ozone and volatile organic compounds (VoC). Both of these use the same PCB, with different population options. The circuits are very similar, and this helps keeps costs down. At right is the VoC sensor.

The add on boards speak I2C, which makes adding new boards easy. Anyone with a sensor can make a board for it and leverage the egg infrastructure to send the data up to the web. It does not need to be an air quality sensor – pretty much anything will work if you are prepared to make software changes to do something useful with the data.

• There is an ATTiny48, as with all the sensor boards.
• Each board has a unique ID, which means the boards are all individually addressable.
• Connection is via the 2mm pitch cable. This board plugs into the AQE shield. My hope is that we will have a daisy chain sensor network topology, but right now it is star. This would mean adding a second connector onto each board, pushing up the cost. Right now, the board in the picture is as it would be shipped (plus the cable, of course).

As always, click on the image to biggify.

Air Quality Egg updates

We have made a lot of progress on the Air Quality Egg, so it is time to share some updates. I’ll do another post with some high level information. For now, let’s dive right into the AQE shield.

On the right is a build of the egg shield mounted on top of an SMD Nanode RF. Let me point out some of the important parts of it:

• The shield includes two sensors, CO and NO2. The round pads for these are visible below the yellow softwire. I’ll post a pic of the sockets and sensors soon, so you can see how that works. The most important thing is that they are quite high and need airflow, so you won’t be able to stack shields on top of the AQE shield.
• There are also 4 cable connectors to wire in additional I2C sensor boards. These are divided into two separate channels, and can have a bunch of sensors on each channel (up to 128? Anyway, a lot, and we’ll run into other constraints long before that). All extra sensors will be added on using this interface. These connectors are 2mm pitch, NOT JST’s.
• Power will be supplied using a 2.1mm center positive barrel jack. This jack will power the shield, Nanode and any additional boards. Currently we do plan to populate the 5v micro-USB connector visible at top left, but it will not be plugged in, and the AQE enclosure will not include space to connect it.
• The diamond shaped chip below the yellow wire is an ATTiny48 – so plenty of pins and space to write some code. Currently, I do NOT anticipate that the 6-pin programming header will be populated for production, but you can certainly add it yourself if you want to reprogram the tiny-48.
• In this image the RFM12 radio is not populated, but of course that will be included.

Ignore the yellow softwire. If you are curious, it is providing 5V to the 2.5V regulator (whoops!) and will not be present in the production version of the board.