Project specifications + TI’s “Analog Design Contest”.

Yesterday I have been mailing around to get some more information about what we may use from the previously posted open-source projects.
And what the requirement are of the system we need to design.
There are some tricky things (not blowing up the peltier, labiew interface, …), but I think we will over win them J
First something about the specifications of the system we need to design.

·        The temperature needs to be regulated stepless over a region from 10°C to 70°C.

·        The temperature must be regulated to a certain temperature within 5seconds, or if this is not possible, as fast as the Peltier can go.

·        It doesn’t has to run stand alone, but it is a bonus point =)

·        Additional sensor/actuators may be used, but are not necessary (i.e. a 7-segment display to monitor the temperature)

·        So far we have no limitation in the mechanical part (the height, width, depth, used materials, …)

·        We are free to chose the µC and which program we want to use to make the GUI on the PC

Also I have sent a mail to Texas Instruments to participate their “Analog Design Contest”, more info about this can be found here:
http://www.ti.com/ww/eu/university/analog_design_contest.html
This contest has some very cool features, you can get for 100$ of development tools and you can sample some free samples of their IC’s (that was already possible when you made an account on their site).

And if you are really going for it you can win some $$$ !!!.
The only thing you need to do for that is;

·       Use 3 analog IC’s of TI in your design

Or

·       Use a Microprocessor/controller of TI and use 2 other external analog IC’s of TI (so the internal ADC of the µC/P are not allowed :p)

The analog IC’s may be chosen from the following categories:

·     Amplifiers

·     Clocks and Timers

·     Comparators

·     Data Converters

·     Interface devices

·     Power Management devices

·     RF devices

·     Switches

·     Temperature sensors

So this won’t be a problem because we need at least one temperature sensor and a ‘switch’ to control the Peltier.
Also some Power Management Devices might be useful in our project to power the µC.
And the most beautiful part of it all, they have a small µC board (the msp430) that has a build in USB interface (I bet that it has some chips onboard to emulate a virtual COM port ;) ) for only 4,3$.
More info + a video about it can be found here:
https://estore.ti.com/MSP-EXP430G2-MSP430-LaunchPad-Value-Line-Development-kit-P2031.aspx