Tag Archives: hardware

Final tweaking to Artemis, the smart paludarium controller

Getting ready to have the main PCB built in China, I discovered some things that made me rethink… And make some pretty radical changes to the PCB… Enter v1.01!

Change 1: PWM for LEDs in high-res

The most major change “came to light” when I played with a prototype to control my new LED panel. Right now it uses PWM directly from the Arduino, so that is 256 steps (8 bit resolution).

But especially at lower light intensities I can see the LEDs take their steps. As I also have 16 channels controlled by a PCA9685 chip which is 12 bit resolution (so 4096 steps), I decided to use the PCA9685 outputs to run lighting. This in turn meant I needed to rethink which outputs work on 12V and which ones work on 24V. In the end I solved the puzzle and came up with a clean design:

Artemis v1.01: Changes to the layout of 12V and 24V power feeds and connectors. Note the large 6 pin connectors on the left: They are 24V RGB-CCT outputs now run from the PCA9685 PWM chip.
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Hardware ‘n stuff ordered!

Today I finally ordered most of the hardware I’ll require for the further construction of the paludarium. Not computer chips this time, but pumps, filters, pipes, heaters and other cool stuff. In this blog post I’ll highlight some of the components that I’ve selected.

Aquatic Filter

Originally I used an Eheim 2222 external filter for Paludarium 1.0. However, this filter was already too small, so for the new Paludarium 2.0 it would definitely be too small, so I was in need of an upgrade. The price of the larger Eheim filters scared me a bit – So I decided to go for another vendor, JBL. They have a much cheaper filter line, the greenline filters:

The JBL Greenline 1501e external filter

The JBL Greenline 1501e external filter

I bought their 1501e version, which outputs an impressive 1400 litres per hour and Read more »