Projects

Here’s the joysticks for the PVG32 valve.

Circuit board found inside the joystick:

It has been quiet for several months now and not much has happened during that time. But now it’s time to get some projects moving forward again.

Here’s couple new pictures. These were mostly done during the summer already.

First we have the head module board mostly assembled now. Also some new fixes and additions have been included.

Here’s also the Planar display attached into the lid of the box that will contain the main hardware. This particular display unit doesn’t have the mounting tabs so some other way to mount it had to be figured out. To not spend too much time in this phase some holes were just drilled through the lid and everything bolted together. Later there will hopefully be some arrangement that will make the whole thing look cleaner and not have the mounting hardware visible to the outside. In front of the display panel there is a 4 mm thick acrylic sheet for protection that can be replaced if it gets too many scratches. Well there already is quite many visible scratches but they don’t seem to really affect the visibility of the EL display.

In the next photo from the backside we can see 5 rectangular pieces cut from a copper circuit board glued behind the plastic in the left side. Also there is the small board with the DIP package IC and some other components and different color wires coming out of it. These are capacitive sensing buttons made with a QProx touch sensing chip. Originally this was just a test of how well the sensing works but at least for now it has worked well enough that they have stayed there. This also needs a new board that integrates the 5 sensing elements and the QProx circuitry on one PCB instead of the current temporary solution.

Using a touchscreen was also considered as it could have made it possible to make a more intuitive user interface. But after considering the environment where this is used and that the touchscreen would add another layer between the display and viewer’s eyes the decision was made to use just the capacitive touch sensing buttons. Also this interface is mostly just used for changing settings which shouldn’t happen that often.

In the next photo the processor board is mounted behind the display.

Last photo for this update is a Danfoss PVG32 proportional valve which will be used to control the crane. One more thing that needs to be done is the electrical wiring between the joysticks and this valve.