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Control & Power Thoughts

A project log for Tactile Tactical Interface

Heat/Cold/Vibration interface for situational awareness for firefighters, police, military, transportation, gaming, etc.

disasterarchydisasterarchy 08/23/2018 at 02:580 Comments

Okay so for control and power here is what I am looking at:

For the vibration motors they will take between 2 and 5V with higher voltages causing more vibration.  About 3 to 4 volts will work for my purposes.  This will draw about 100 mA.

For the Peltier coolers, from my experimentation it seems like 5V  @ 1.5 A will be sufficient.  However, they will need to be controlled so that they provide steady cooling and then heating when needed for alerts.  I am thinking it will not be as simple as turning it on and off or even using PWM.   Based on the discussion hereit seems like I don't want to have it turn on and off using a thermostat like device because that is inefficient and causes thermal cycling.  They also say that PWM signals will make it work less efficiently.  

For the first version of control, I am thinking of using my Arduino along with the adafruit motorshield to control the peltier coolers.  I will add in some capacitors to build a simple LRC circult to smooth out the PWM signals.  As for the on/off vibration motor control, I'll just use some digital pins attached to transistors for switching.  

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