Introduction: Regulator Tester With Faces

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About: SUNDAY ROBOTICS is a dynamic, creative and versatile start-up founded in late 2021 by an electrical & electronics engineer who has a dream of creating things that are majestic and revolutionary. A bunch of…

Electronics is fun, testing is fun, let's make it funnier with a Regulator tester with Faces! :)

Building reliable electronics hardware requires testing. We can either do it manually (which takes lots of time) or build and use circuit test set-ups.

On those, we have a fixture with spring-loaded probes (pogo pins) located on a surface or a unique slot that is specially designed to hold a specific electronics circuit. All of the probes or pins are connected to a tester hardware. We put the electronics to be tested to the fixture and bupppp.... Voltages, currents, signals and all whats required gets tested.. Circuits who passes the test become ready to be used or to be sent to the customer!

So, we decided to build a tester for the regulator modules (MT3608 Step Up) we use in our lab. We then asked ourselves, why not to build a funny one! And here it is, at the end we very much like it!

We 3D Printed a fixture with a slot and lid just custom-designed for the MT3608 regulator module. There are 4 pogo pins 2 for the input and 2 for the outputs to be tested. We are able to set the desired output voltage and the system checks if the output voltage is in the desired range ( 0.5V-Vset+0.5V).

As you can guess there will be 2 options as the output;

1) Yellow happy face lights up, regulator module passes the test !!! (We feel happy!)

2) Red unhappy face lights up, regulator module failed the test !!! (We feel happy again because we catched the faulty regulator before our customer gets it and become unhappy!)

We hope this project also makes you happy too!

Supplies

TOOLS:

*A3 Sized ProBUDDY Kit (Very helpful when building projects): https://www.sundayrobotics.com/probuddy/ (Kickstarter campaign will be launched on 01 February 2022 Tuesday, Don't miss First Hour and First Day opportunities!)

*3D CAD Software

*3D Printer (We have a Cubicon Single Plus)

*Laser cutter for plexiglass (You can use other handmade materials, rather than plexiglass)

*Permanent marker for the faces.

*Your creativity and drawing skills for the faces.

MATERIALS:

1x Arduino Uno R3

1x 16x2 LCD

50cm x 12 V White Strip Led

2x IRF630 Mosfet

1x KY-040 Rotary Encoder

Jumper cables

2x 220 uF 50V Capacitors

1x 82K Resistors (1/4 W)

1x 18K Resistors (1/4 W)

1x 12V Battery (Supply)

1x Toggle Switch

1x 9V Battery (Input Voltage Source)

Step 1: Hardware

We decided to build our project on a ProBUDDY Kit, since it makes building, storing and carrying project hardware easy. We first chose our ProBUDDY Kit size as A3.

Arduino is the heart of our test setup. It is supplied by a 12V battery (Lead-acid in this set-up) and there is our encoder module to configure the Vset and a 2x16 character LCD connected to our Arduino.

We use a 9V Battery to provide test voltage to the regulator (to be tested). The voltage output of the regulator is connected to ADC pin of the Arduino through a resistor voltage divider.

Step 2: Software

The code is not complicated and it is as follows;

#define ANALOG_IN_PIN A0
#include

#include LiquidCrystal lcd(12,11,5,4,3,2);

int e;

float voltage=0.0;

float R1 = 82000.0;

float R2 = 18000.0;

float deger=0;

float analog_deger=0;

int CLK = 6;

int DT = 7;

int SW = 8;

int smileface = 9;

int sadface = 10;

int set_voltage;

int counter;

int currentStateCLK;

int lastStateCLK;

unsigned long lastButtonPress=0;

int set_butonu;

void setup()

{

e = EEPROM.read(0);

lcd.clear();

lcd.begin(16,2);

Serial.begin(9600);

pinMode(CLK, INPUT);

pinMode(DT, INPUT);

pinMode(SW, INPUT_PULLUP);

pinMode(smileface, OUTPUT);

pinMode(sadface, OUTPUT);

lcd.setCursor(0,0);

lcd.print("Set Value = ");

lcd.print(e);

lcd.setCursor(0,1);

lcd.print("Change / Confirm");

delay(3000);

lcd.clear();

counter = e;

}

void loop()

{

currentStateCLK = digitalRead(CLK); /

if (currentStateCLK != lastStateCLK && currentStateCLK == 1)

{

if (digitalRead(DT) != currentStateCLK)

{ counter ++; }

else

{ counter --; }

Serial.print("set ");

Serial.println(counter);

}

lastStateCLK = currentStateCLK;

int set_butonu = digitalRead(SW);

if (set_butonu == LOW)

{

if (millis() - lastButtonPress > 50)

{ set_voltage = counter;

EEPROM.write(0,set_voltage);

Serial.println("set_voltage=");

Serial.println(set_voltage);

}

lastButtonPress = millis();

}

e = EEPROM.read(0);

delay(1);

analog_deger = analogRead(A0);

deger = (analog_deger*5.0)/1024.0;

voltage = deger/(R2/(R1+R2));

if (voltage<=(e+0.5) && voltage>=(e-0.5) )

{

digitalWrite(smileface, HIGH);

digitalWrite(sadface, LOW);

}

else if (voltage >=1 && voltage <=(e-0.5))

{

digitalWrite(smileface, LOW);

digitalWrite(sadface, HIGH);

}

else if (voltage >=(e+0.5))

{

digitalWrite(smileface, LOW);

digitalWrite(sadface, HIGH);

}

else

{

digitalWrite(smileface, LOW);

digitalWrite(sadface, LOW);

}

lcd.setCursor(0,0);

lcd.print("set=");

lcd.print(e);

lcd.setCursor(8,0);

lcd.print("cnt=");

lcd.print(counter);

lcd.setCursor(0,1);

lcd.print("voltage = ");

lcd.print(voltage);

}

Step 3: Final Words

Let's make sure that our products always make people happy! Let's be happy! This is what life is all about!

Thanks!