Quote:
Originally Posted by Charles Freeborn
I've got some arduino boards with the intent of making an intervalometer for time lapse camera control. If I could just find some time to put it together... I can see many uses for temperature controllers. When I bend guitar sides the electric heating elements can be hard to maintain steady. Too hot they burn the wood. Too cool it breaks. Also planning an ...ahem.... vape thing with a steam punk theme. Need precise temp control, but output to analog gauges to keep the retro thing happening.
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If all you're doing is temperature control, a simple low cost PID-controller is a much better answer than designing your own. Wire in a thermocouple and a control output to the heating element through an SSR, and you're done. I've done process control that way a number of times, and it's faster and more reliable than doing it with an Arduino.
The same is true of an intervalometer -- timer remotes already exist for most common camera bodies, and they're generally not much more expensive than the cost of hardware for an Arduino DIY project.
Where Arduino buys you some benefit is if you need it to go a step beyond simple temperature control, or timed events. Say you need to watch a temperature, then take some action when it reaches a certain point, like firing a relay that opens a valve or lights a light. Or if you need to do something that requires a little more "intelligence" than simple if-then stuff, like watching for a pattern on some analog input to take some useful action. Or if you need to interface with some external thing, like, say, the local network. Or if the intervalometer needed to change the interval based on light levels, say, it's wired in to a solar panel so you can automatically adjust the exposures longer as it gets darker.