Getting Ready For Testing

After a load of little changes and fixes which took me into the early hours this morning and the best part of today, I managed to tidy up and sort a few more bits;  I added 36 default programmes which consist of 36 cone programmes;  these will be the default programmes the controller will ship with straight "out-the-box", so to say.  I've removed all the features that need extra work in order to get the basics up and running in the new chip.

Happy 2018 !

Well, tomorrow is the last day of my Xmas holiday break, and over that time I have really busy;  a few weeks ago I created my first ever clay model, which is a bust of my own interpretation of Hercules, this was then made into a 4 piece plaster mould.  I took out the first stoneware slip cast piece from the mould today (the other 2 fell apart getting them out!) and have been cleaning it up.

In-between doing this, I have been working on the controller firmware;  I did manage to kill another microcontroller by accident, so, I will need to wait until the end of the month before I can replace it, and also buy another controller box to put the new version of the controller in for testing,  I don't want to use controller box I already have as it's already mounted on the wall and hooked up to my kiln using the previous firmware version.

Just a little update on the cheap Ebay thermocouple chips, apparently when I tested then using the thermocouple simulator they appear to drop-off towards the upper end of the temperatures,  I'll try and do a post with some more definitive results.

One thing I did want to look at was changing the board layout on the next version to use the Maxim MAX31855KASA+ which is lot cheaper than the AD595 at measuring temperatures;  if I do this it would make the overall cost of a board a lot cheaper, by comparison, the AD595 is £15, and the Maxim is £5;  the other idea I had was to create an internal real-time clock rather than use the DS1302 chip, as although it's nice to have a real date and time clock;  you only actually need to use a fairly rough clock for timing the firings;  I don't know exactly how accurate an internal microcontroller clock would run but it would interesting to find out as that would reduce the price and complexity even further.

Lots to do!

[update]

Right, I got some replacement parts and bought another box;  I have installed the new test board and hooked up another plugin transformer;  all appears good - I can now use this version for testing the new firmware running on the bigger microcontroller chip.