#science diy

[time-loopzim]

[ohicosplay]

Queadlunn- Well, in the past ~7 months this project has gotten a bit... well, different. The tricorder has gone from a prop glued to the back of a cellphone to a fully-fledged hand scanner (if not professionally built). As of this post it’s at version 4.5 fw J. It’s a good size, smaller than I was thinking it’d be, and it’s even got sounds like the ones from the in-show tricorders (the button presses and alarms, not the constant scan whirring). Sadly, there’s not enough pins left on my controller to run a lot of cool, blinky lights.

At first I was using a 32u4-based Feather Adalogger but the memory space was nowhere near what I needed to run the programming. I’ve now got it running on the Feather m0 Adalogger and all of my (horrible) code is using only 26% of the available space.

Current scan modes and sensors cover the following:

EM Energy: UV (Approximation), UV (Real), IR, Visible intensity (LUX), Visible wavelength (Color)

Mechanical: IR-reflective proximity (not working yet), Acceleration (3-axis), Magnetometer (3-axis), Digital gyroscope (3-axis)

Atmospheric: Temp (IR non-contact), Temp (ambient #1), Temp (Ambient #2), Relative atmospheric humidity, Atmospheric pressure

Atmospheric Gasses (in PPM): NH3 (Ammonia), CO (Carbon monoxide), NO2 (Nitrogen dioxide), C3H8 (Propane), C4H10 (Isobutane), CH4 (Methane), H2 (Hydrogen), C2H5OH (Ethanol)

Here’s my code for it: Pastebin

My big inspiration for the project has been the Open Source Science Tricorder by Peter Jansen. It’s an incredible project and I have major respect to the creator.

My next step is to build a functioning touchpad for the controls (there’s already a capacitive controller) and continue building the casing for it. Well, that, and working on the code.