Our project in a nutshell

Today I finally founded some time to post on our blog.

We (me Glenn, and my teammate Dimitri) are assigned the “Bio-sensors” project.
At school they do research at bio-sensors and there for the need to be able to heat it up from 10°C to 70°C and vice versa.
We need to design that heater, and one of the main challenges, in mine opinion, is that it needs to be controlled over USB.

Our project leader had the idea of using Peltier elements, so this must be investigated further.
For our first prototype we probably will be using some of these Peltier element:http://samenkopen.net/action_product/927767/869562

And if our teacher allows us, we will be using an open source USB project for AVR microcontrollers, to provide the USB interface.
More info about this can be found here:http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/index.html

A beautiful spin-off USB open-source project, that might be very usefull, can be found here:http://www.harbaum.org/till/i2c_tiny_usb/index.shtml
This uses a very small µC for the USB stack and needs only 2 more I/O pins to communicate with other periphery over the I2C-protocol.
So we can easily connect 1 or more temperature sensors on the I2C bus and an I/O expander to control the peltier element, even maybe some indicators/actuators like LED’s, pushbuttons etc.
The only problem we might run against to is that we run out of µC memory…

Only future will tell what problems we will have to deal with.