Board replacement, Arduino or Pi?

[jamesp...@gmail.com]

Hi Everyone,

I know this page is not that active any more and I know there have been mumerings over the years of an Arduino or Pi replacemnt does anyone have any info of any projects, I have seen the one from @SiegiSimma which looks quite good, are there any others?

[Robert Deliën]

> I know this page is not that active any more and I know there have been mumerings over the years of an Arduino or Pi replacemnt does anyone have any info of any projects, I have seen the one from @SiegiSimma which looks quite good, are there any others?

I have parked my board replacement project, due to long term illness of my EE friend.

I know of one other, similar project, based on an ESP32 instead of a Raspberry Pi Zero, but I cannot cough up the name right now. I do know you can order de board from Oshpark, because I still have two unpopulated purple boards on my desk. For many years already, now I’m thinking about it.

There are many ideas on similar projects, but between the ‘idea’ and having a ‘working project’ is still a lot of perseverance and actual work.

If you just want to bypass the cartridge mechanism; I’m currently in the process of building a new batch of CartridgeGenius devices. Sourcing parts tuns out to be a challenge now, as well as maintaining the price, but I expect to have devices ready to ship late November, or early December.

[James Price]

Thanks Robert, I am currently running Catgenius so dont need the CartridgeGenius it is working fairly well my biggest issue is the box doesnt beep on an error it just stops, that isnt very oftern though. I am more looking to the future for when my unit dies and it would be nice to have some more home automation type features.

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[Robert Deliën]

> Thanks Robert, I am currently running Catgenius so dont need the CartridgeGenius

Good. I just wanted to put out there that they will be available again in some time.

> it is working fairly well my biggest issue is the box doesnt beep on an error it just stops, that isnt very oftern though.

Yeah, that’s still a problem. It’s rooted a the PICC compiler not supporting recursive functional calls. Rightly so, I’d have to say, but it controlled recursion of only one call, to the event handler where everything comes it. I could decouple that, but that would require some mutex-like protection, because we’re not handling events as they happen anymore.

What’s worse, is that my PICC Pro license has ‘expired’. That is; I can no longer activate it after an installation, because this activation service has been taken down. To get that to work again, I would need to buy a new $1000 license, which I can have activated via email. Indefinitely, according to MicroChip, but I thought that f the previous license too.

Perhaps this would be a good occasion to finally switch over to the XC8 Pro compiler, but that would not solve the recursion problem, and it’s still $1000 I could spend on something more important to me.

> I am more looking to the future for when my unit dies and it would be nice to have some more home automation type features.

I think my board was a little over-engineered; I think we’ve spend days on finding appropriate relays alone. Relays that would work well for both 120VAC and 240VAC., yet that would still fit the board. We had a universal switch-mode power supply on board, also for both 120VAC and 240VAC. We had the cat sensor dealt with completely in hardware and we had mains frequency detection to deal with earlier s boxes having 120VAC/50Hz motors installed, running at 60Hz mains.

Perhaps I should publish what we had so far, but I doubt somebody will pick it up.

[Paul Gumerman]

Robert,

I'd love to see what you have so far regarding the board design.

My take on this would be to use an external 12VDC power supply, since they can be had for under $20 on Amazon, and are usually 100-240VAC input.  I would also base it on an ESP32 to get BT and Wifi builtin.  It should be possible to code it using ESPHOME, so a ton of the hard work is already done.  If not, the Arduino IDE supports the ESP32 fairly well, as does PlatformIO.

Paul

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[Robert Deliën]

I'd love to see what you have so far regarding the board design.

I can share the diagram with you, but not for the whole group; I’m a bit shy.

My take on this would be to use an external 12VDC power supply, since they can be had for under $20 on Amazon, and are usually 100-240VAC input.

We designed-in a VigorTronix VTX-214-010-205 (https://uk.farnell.com/vigortronix/vtx-214-010-205/power-supply-ac-dc-5v-2a/dp/2464685). We considered an external power supply too, but decided not to go that route because it would break the drop-in replacement feature. Not needing to drill anywhere in the existing housing, or leading a wire through the vent to an unreliable connector inside the box, would make it much easier for anybody to install.

People here would have no problem with that, but when we’re trying to sell it to anybody not afraid of opening their box, these are things to consider.

I would also base it on an ESP32 to get BT and Wifi builtin.  It should be possible to code it using ESPHOME, so a ton of the hard work is already done.

I chose the Rasberry-Pi Zero (W) because it would hardly require any work on the CPU side. Just a small Kernel driver for the hardware, or perhaps a proper IIO configuration.

I did not look into ESP32 and friends. In my experience, embedded controllers often have sub-standard TCP/IP implementations, causing rare, and hard to find problems.

If I’d go the microcontroller route, I’d probably design-in an I.MX-RT1015 (https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers/arm-microcontrollers/i-mx-rt-crossover-mcus/i-mx-rt1015-crossover-mcu-with-arm-cortex-m7-core:i.MX-RT1015). It features a very capable Cortex-M7 CPU @500MHz, yet it still is available in LQFP-100 packaging. And best of it all: It is fully supported by ZephyrOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(operating_system)).

If not, the Arduino IDE supports the ESP32 fairly well, as does PlatformIO.

I’m not a fan of IDEs. I’m really glad we finally got rid of all sub-par IDEs pushed by all the MCU vendors. I’d rather use my own editor, in my own workflow. Not a big fan of PlatformIO either: You never know what you get, and in the end you’re debugging somebody else’s code, just like you were debugging your own, which would probably be written much better.

[jamesp...@gmail.com]

Wow nice work that looks great

[Robert Deliën]

> Wow nice work that looks great

Yeah; Now I’m going through all the emails again, I cannot help getting the impression we gave up after 90% of the journey…