Space API Control Panel

Arduino project for the control panel of the lab status.

Evolutions (recent to old)

2024-05-01

This is currently a box in the entrance of the lab that contains two galvos as a display of how much time the lab is open and how many people are present, with old-school industrial levers to change those values and a few LEDs because LEDs are always nice.

It is running on an Arduino Uno with an Ethernet Shield and a PoE module since 2016.

A big clean up of the cabling has been done since the last major revision of 2014, and no picture of the previous cablng will be shown here for decency.

2016-01-??

As of January 2016, Ethernet shield support has been added to the Arduino sketch. This allow the arduino to be autonomous and do HTTP request on it's own. A simple POST request is used for updating the status. For the server backend, see PTL-Status-API project.

2014-??-??

The PTL Control Pannel Ardiono is connected by USB to a linux computer. A python script retrieves data (serial) from the Arduino and sends a POST request to the PTL Status API on a remote server.

Build steps

Prepare the config.h file by copying config.example.h, and edit the API key. Ask your favorite sysadmin if you don't currently have access to it.

arduino-cli

Dependencies

Install the Arduino-Bounce library:

# Required because git lib installation is apparently "unsafe"
arduino-cli config set library.enable_unsafe_install true
arduino-cli lib install --git-url https://github.com/mpflaga/Arduino-Bounce.git
arduino-cli lib install Ethernet

Build and flash

You can list the available serial ports on your computer to see which one is right with:

arduino-cli  board list

Then to compile and flash (update the port):

arduino-cli compile --fqbn arduino:avr:uno
# Replace the port by the corresponding one on your computer
arduino-cli upload --fqbn arduino:avr:uno --port /dev/ttyACM0

Arduino IDE 2

Dependencies

This project is using the Arduino-Bounce library which is a bit old, so it is not present in the library manager of Arduino. The easiest solution is to download and install it manually.

• In the IDE, go to File -> Preferences, retrieve the Sketchbook location path and navigate there.
• Go into the libraries folder
• Download the Arduino-Bounce library from https://github.com/mpflaga/Arduino-Bounce.git. Either use git to clone it there, or download the zip version and extract it in this folder. You should now have a Arduino-Bounce folder in the Arduino/libraries/ folder.

Build

Use the upload button to compile and flash, make sure you selected the right serial port on the top menu.