_ IN·CU·BA·TIO

MY INCUBATOR STORY.

I worked on the incubator. I wanted to make the incubator out of plexiglass. To make sure it was stable enough and have enough isolation, I decided to go for 4 mm plexiglass and double walls. I had to adjust the 3D model to make this work. This took more time than expected, because it is essential that every single part fits, otherwise it's useless.
While lasercutting it took a while to get the right speed to manage to cut through all the way. I ended up cutting with a speed of 0.4, power 100, dpi 700. Once I had all the pieces cut I started to get the electronics working.
I did this by building it up step by step, fist the buttons, the led, the ventilator, the temperature sensor etc. This made me understand better the way the circuit and the Arduino programme work. But the biggest challenge still lay ahead of me the 7 digit display. By looking it up I learned how it works, but I didn't manage to figure out which pin corresponded with the corresponding digit segment. I understood the pins were numbered, but where to start counting? With the help of Jelmer I managed to understand how the digit segment works.

Once I had everything working I started to put it over to a circuit board. This was going quite well until I had everything ready set... test... fail.
Apparently my issue was mi digital temperature sensor... it started to give temperatures between 60 to 100. I thought it was a calibrating issue, until I touched it AUW.. 100 degrees.
So I ordered a thermistor. After putting this in I was up and running.
The coolest was seeing the incubator working at night. A transparent box with a big red light, creating disco effects, cause it turned on and off every second and lit the whole room. Everytime it reached 25 degrees it went off and immediately on as soon as it went down a little, as result a so called disco effect.
It was cool but now I learned, not good for the relay I had. At one point the relay just stopped working and the lamp stayed on, and the incubator reached 40 degrees over night. I was temperature shocking my mycelium. But I tapped the relay it would go off again. I decided to order a different relay, the Sparkfun Beefcake relay. Also I used the new code that was on the site, this new code integrated a delay, so the lamp wouldn’t be blinking all the time but go on for 5 sec and off again for at least 3 sec.
Latest issue: lamp stopped working. I tested with a different light bulb, works fine. Need a new IR lamp.