Computing stuff tied to the physical world

Room Board assembly

In Hardware on Feb 2, 2010 at 00:01

As announced recently, I’ve now added a full kit for the Room Board in the shop, containing:

  • The room board PCB.
  • SHT11 temperature + humidity sensor.
  • An LDR light sensor.
  • The ELV PIR motion sensor.
  • Two 6-pin male headers.

Here is the kit (oops, forgot the two 6-pin headers):

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From top left to bottom right: PIR lens, PIR sensor, 3-pin header, SHT11, LDR, Room Board PCB, pre-assembled PIR sensor board.

The hardest part to solder is the SHT11 sensor. It has 10 gold pads on the side, of which only 8 are connected. Make sure you place the sensor in the right orientation. With the text on the pcb readable, the round part is pointing down:

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Next, solder in the LDR light sensor. Be sure to place it in the LDR1 position:

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The wires of the LDR may be a bit more difficult to solder than ordinary components, so be sure to use enough flux:

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Next, we need to prepare the ELV PIR sensor board – the board itse;f already has all the SMD’s soldered on, just the PIR sensor itself.

Careful – do NOT touch the surface of the PIR sensor, as any traces of oil will reduce its sensitivity:

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The sensor has to be pushed through the bottom side of the lens holder, into the board – from the non-component side:

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Solder the three wires and snip them off. Don’t use too much solder or you’ll risk shorting out the pads with the nearby components:

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Then turn the board around and click the fresnel lens onto the base (it has three different-sized notches):

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Next, we need to connect the boards together:

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The pins go through the room board and should be snipped off once soldered:

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Almost there – the last step is to solder the two 6-pin male headers onto the room board. To hold them in the right position, I just push them into a JeeNode:

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… then place the room board on top and solder both headers, all 12 pins. Leave the 8 holes on the side of the PCB free (these are for another type of PIR sensor):

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That’s it – you’re done!

For more info on uploading the “rooms.pde” sketch firmware to the JeeNode, go back to the docs page.

Update – for the Room Board v2, see this weblog post.