Programmable Load Archives - Everybody Staze...

I have wanted a Programmable load for a while, and truly needed one since I purchased an unknown quality HP 6624 for $10 at Goodwill and needed a way to test it before re-selling. I’ve looked at the venerable BK Precision, as well as the “knockoff” (or OEM, depending on who you believe), Maynuo equivalent. But, I just couldn’t swallow the $300+ price tag. I also looked at building one, but it just never made it on my list. But then, Arachnid Labs came to the rescue, and created the Re:Load Pro, a programmable version of his inexpensive Re:Load that offered a simple DC load equivalent to Dave Jones’ venerable one from years ago.

Unfortunately, I somehow missed the Kickstarter for the Re:load Pro, so I had to order one off Tindie and wait for them to ship. Thankfully for my pocketbook, and my wife, I had some money in Paypal from an eBay sale that I used to buy the Re:Load Pro.

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For a few years now, I’ve really wanted to monitor my water usage at the house, and like most American homes (or at least, every one I’ve seen), my analog water meter sits in the ground out by the street, making measurement a bit difficult. But, what little information is out there indicates that it should be doable with a Hall Effect Sensor (something that can “see” the spinning magnet within the meter, and output pulses). Then it’s just a matter of recording those pulses, and sending them back to my computer… enter the wild world of Arduino programming, and the wonder that is eBay and the inexpensive Chinese Arduino clones. But truthfully, what pushed me over to the idea of doing some Arduino projects (other than the really inexpensive Chinese options), was building a simple LED cube to stick in my office at work. 100x LED’s are only $4.75 or so from China, an Arduino Pro Mini knockoff is less than $3 (or just an DIP ATMega328p is about the same)… really just depends on how you want to set it all up. Anyway, I’ll try to have a new post about that a bit later. As well as one on how my water meter project is coming… the biggest issue with that is power. I either have to run some cat5 out to the meter to provide power, and return signal (I guess phone wire would work as well), or I need to have the unit run off batteries, and send the data back wirelessly (Xbee?). And obviously, if battery powered, I’m not going to want to go out and replace the batteries every week, so ideally 6months+ of runtime would be ideal… which may not be possible since the Hall Effect Sensor indicates it wants to draw about 4mA. =/

Anyway, these are the things I’m trying to work on in my “free time” (see previous posts about small child in the house). So yes, I’m showing up to this party a bit late, but maybe I had to do some analog work before I “graduated” to digital. I just wish I had learned C at some point in my learning programming before now.

But, a few things I’m working on project wise are:

GPS Disciplined Oscillator
LED Cube
Water Meter gauge
Parking Sensor (to let me know when I’m far enough into the garage)
Garage Door Sensor (so I can stop turning around down the street to see if the door is shut, and just check my phone)
Simple Programmable DC Power Supply, and matching Programmable DC Load

So, all of that should keep me busy for a while… =)