rcbishop
Well-Known Member
I'm one. Not just in degree, but I actually design electronic devices, mostly medical. Schematic design, PCB layout, firmware, soldering, debugging. I have a 1-man consulting company. I know there are others here.
I just finished the board layout for a really cool O2 sensor tonight. It will measure the O2 concentration using light. I bounce red light off a tablet that contains a powder that fluoresces. There is a very small time lag (nanoseconds) between when the red light hits the tablet and when it floresces. I blast the tablet with a high-frequency sine wave then use FFT (fast fourier transform) to measure the lag in response. This lag is proportional to the amount of O2 where the tablet is.
The cool thing is that it can be used in liquid, so works with beer! Once I get it working I'll watch the O2 deplete in my carboy during fermentation. Can't wait.
That sounds like a cool project! I'd be interested to see what kind of readings you'd get during fermentation.
Is that the same Festo (on one of the silk layers, it looks like) that makes a lot of air cylinders and such?
Here's one of my designs -- a little embedded computer based on an ARM926 processor, meant for industrial automation. An LCD panel / touch screen connect to that pin header at the top, but they cover the entire board when they're installed. This was the first one to be built, so there's lots of little mistakes (note the wires tacked on and cartoonishly big power connector), but it does work!