Mendeleev

Description

The large interactive periodic table created in 2011 is in dire need of an update. Since the development of a neat tablet application used by tutors, which contains a lot of extra data about all the different elements in the table, the idea arose to visualize this data on the large scale table. The life size table has every element on display (except for the radioactive ones for obvious reasons) with some of the elements being interactive. For example a small motor driver is added to rotate a crystal while it's being lighted by UV LEDs. Therefor we went for a modular approach. Each box would have it's own Arduino based controller board with optional motor drivers, inputs and outputs. These boards will communicate over a RS-485 interface with a Raspberry Pi as master who will also act as gateway and parser of the data coming from the tablet application.

Components

1 × ATSAMD21G18 Cortex®-M0+ based microcontroller

5 × TPS54201 4.5V-to-28V Input Voltage, Synchronous Buck LED Driver, 1.5A output

1 × MCP23017 16bit I²C IO Expander

1 × MTCH101 Single channel capacitive proximity detector

Project Logs

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Assembly of Rev.01
Wim Van Gool • 09/06/2019 at 06:01 • 0 comments

Some minor bugfixes in the LED Driver and and an updated way of lighting the name of each element. resulted in the creation of the new PCBs with revision 01.
Paste is applied using a steel stencil, then everything is placed by hand and ready to go through the small converyor reflow oven!
Small test setup
Wim Van Gool • 05/08/2019 at 17:05 • 0 comments

We've managed to assembled the first 3 boxes with electronics in the small test setup. The concept works as intended. The communication test with the BeagleBoneBlack using the Bernardo cape was also successful. The sensitivity of the capacitive touch sensor is also increased so the presence of a hand is detected from a few centimeters in front of the glass. The glass itself is a triple layer museum glass panel of almost 3cm thick.
UV test
Wim Van Gool • 05/08/2019 at 16:49 • 0 comments

First test with the UV LEDs on some uranium glass.
Flex PCBs assembled
Wim Van Gool • 05/08/2019 at 16:46 • 0 comments

We assembled the first flex panel with the RGBW and UV LEDs.
Flex PCBs arrived
Wim Van Gool • 03/18/2019 at 09:42 • 0 comments

Since we will be using some high power LEDs to illuminate every element, we opted for a flex PCB which will be glued on a large custom copper heatsink. The boards arrived, the custom heatsinks should arrive soon. This heatsink will also place the LEDs in a nice angle towards the box and prevent us from blinding the people passing by.
First Prototypes assembled
Wim Van Gool • 03/18/2019 at 09:37 • 0 comments

We got our first boards and most of the components, assembled them at the FabLab Leuven Prototype Lab and got the Arduino bootloader loaded on all 3 prototypes boards. We're still missing a few components which have to be hand soldered (DIP Switch, M3 standoffs for proximity antenna)