Amir Lazarovich

Project Safety Pyro

This week we played around with different input sensors. Since two weeks ago I used a sonar sensor, which could eventually play a nice role in detecting collisions for my hovercraft, this week I chose to play with a pyroelectric sensor. In other words, a motion detector.

I wanted to create another board that exposes all the pins of the ATmega328p while allowing me an easy access for my brushless motors and servo. So I made it :)

Since this week is about input devices, I added a pyroelectric sensor to that board as well and now I have a safety mechanism that stops the motors every time a human being is about to touch the front part of the hovercraft. Safety comes first! these motors are super fast and dangerous.

Tips & failures

I ended up printing two times the board before I got it to work. This first mistake was changing the PNG files which resulted in bad offsets. The second stupid mistake was me not noticing that I haven't changed the clearance to be 16mil and left it in its default 8mil state. That resulted with lines connected to each other. The worst case about it is that I could have seen it in the first board but I overlooked it :(. Each print took about an hour.

Jeff taught me how to etch a board which is a much faster process and supports smaller details. Unfortunately when I transferred the printed sketch onto the PCB I might have giggled it a bit and the sketch was ruined. Be careful when you iron the printing onto the board otherwise it will move.

Updated fab.lbr file with ATmega328p and pyroelectric
Eagle design
Eagle output
Arduino code

Input Devices