Louverduino

Louverduino was designed to replace the setup I have that I designed for my Tempest SXR casemod over on TBCS. In the original mod I have my Arduino and it's sensor shield stuffed into the case with some jumper wires going to a small protoboard with the backup power circuitry attached. I needed something a little more polished for the casemod so I designed the Louverduino! Read more...

The casemod consisted of a servo-driven vent setup that replaced the original top panel to the NZXT Tempest EVO case it was based on. I designed the top panel in SketchUp and had the parts cut out of styrene sheet at a local waterjet cutting shop. The idea behind it all was for the vents to be closed then the computer is off and when the computer is on they'll vary their opening depending on internal case temperature. Underneath these vents sit a pair of 140mm exhaust fans to exhaust hot air out of the case.

Here's a quick rundown of how it all works:

1. Louverduino senses 5VDC on sense pin when computer is turned on.
2. Code starts temp monitoring.
3. 12VDC goes in through 5VDC regulator and through a pair of 10F/2.5V capacitors in series (for a total of 5F @ 5V).
4. ATMega328 reads value of 10k-Ohm 2-wire temp sensor and moves servo position accordingly.
5. 5V is removed from sense pin (computer is off)
6. Voltage stored in capacitors is used to close the vents

Here's a video I made demonstrating the function of the setup.

As you can see it works very well. The servo opens and closes the vents a little on the fast side, but we'll address that later on.

Here is the initial setup I had in the case. Yea, not too pretty, but it worked like a charm! Plus I wanted to continue to use my Arduino for other development projects, so I couldn't have it tied up in the casemod!

Louverduino started out as a very rough PCB layout in Fritzing. My initial plan was to etch this board myself (hence the reason for it being single-sided) But I ended up going a different route.

Over time though it got revised again and again, during which time I learned how to use CadSoft Eagle PCB layout software.

This brought a whole new dimension and finish to the mod, so I HAD to get boards made! I used BatchPCB (a service of Sparkfun) to have the boards made. The total cost shipped to me was about $30 for 2 completed professional-looking boards.

Here are a few final pics and a video of the completed casemod.

With some help of the guys over at the Arduino forums I had a library created just for this mod called VarSpeedServo. What this library does over the standard servo library is give the servo speed adjustment. You use "myservo.slowmove(pos)" rather than "myservo.move(pos)". This gave a much better overall feel to the vents opening and closing. See the difference in the next video.

You can download the full code here and the VarSpeedServo library (.zip) here. If you want any info as to BoM or schematics/Eagle files just shoot me an email at will.lyon@computersandcircuits.com! Also check out the full worklog for Tempest SXR and the dev log for the Louverduino at TBCS!

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