My first real-world onion project...



  • After 7 months of R & D it's time to put the project into production. Boards arrived today and i am happier than a pig in...

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    The arduino dock really simplified the design for me and I now have a really awesome little programmable unit with a counter input, 2 analog/4-20ma inputs, 4 digital inputs, 2 fet outputs, RTC, RS485 port and an OLED for good measure.

    The smaller piggyback board is ESP12 powered and has 4-20ma input, 2 digital inputs, one output, load cell amplifier, RTC and OLED

    I have christened the board "IoT ONE" - hope you onioneers approve! šŸ™‚



  • 6 Complete boards ready for installation in their new homes... thank you Onion for plenty grey hair and much more pride! šŸ™‚

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  • Just curious - where did you get your boards made? They look great!



  • @Malcolm-White Thank you! šŸ™‚ They are made by a company in Cape Town, South Africa - Trax Interconnect.



  • @Paul-Cousins hi, great project. i'm always interested in how projects go together and it appears to me that the what looks like a buck converter/dc to dc converter was a plugin pre-existing board and i wanted to know if you could mention which board it is?



  • @Douglas-Kryder It's an adjustable LM2596 power supply module DC/DC BUCK 3A which I purchase from a local supplier for a lot cheaper than the raw LM2596 chip would cost on it's own.

    Here's a clearer photo...
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  • Some general questions as I am building some of my own hardware. In high volume you want to limit the amount of through-hole components as pick and place machines are cheaper. Why didn't you use the Omega SMT version ?



  • @brolly759 The SMD version was released about 2 weeks after I had designed my boards! :))

    Heres the last part of the system I haven't documented: 4 port Pi Zero hub & bareboard 720p cameras. The arduino dock powers all 3 cameras without issue

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  • @Paul-Cousins thanks for that info. and you are correct about the pricing. amazon has very similar board from eboot in 6 pack 11.00US. and they work great for using 24v10A power supply to 3.3v/5v projects. at first i thought the omega was under the lcd but now i realize you have an additional piggy-backed board under this top board. that is a very clever methodology for design . do you still use the onion expansion board underneath? and finally, for this post anyway, did the pi zero camera setup make it into this board? thanks.
    edit: i now see it did.



  • It's been a while since the last update but I wanted to show off the cute 3D printed case I designed for my device...

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    And here's a sneaky cell phone image of one out in the wild looking after monster of a machine...

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    I've managed to sell the entire first batch of boards - quite happy about that! I'm now busy working on a second generation that adds a few more nifty features as well as correcting a few quirks in the original design. Despite initial concerns and a lot of grey hair, the omega is turning out to be a reliable little device. Thanks again to the community for all the tips and assistance given! Onioneers rock! šŸ™‚



  • Awesome!



  • Congratulations!



  • Taking it to the next level:
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    This is my travelling demo unit I am working on. I added a Pi driven touch screen to the mix to allow for operator interaction with mysql in the onion via the onion AP, access control granted via a nifty little serial fingerprint scanner (can run on either pi or onion), barcode scanner and a little "closed loop machine demo" which contains 2 servo's and a microswitch that I still need to complete. It's come a long way since the veroboard prototype days! šŸ™‚



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