Saturday, July 23, 2016

Arduino-Cryocooler Handshake!

Just look at this!

The curved traces are "artistic" or something
That's my first attempt at having a printed circuit board manufactured, and it turned out mostly okay! I had breadboarded-up an Arduino-cryocooler interface circuit, and was dreading wiring it up using perfboard. I'd heard of the numerous small-quantity PCB manufacturers around these days and decided to try one out, Seeed Studio. I drafted up the circuit in Fritzing, a free PCB CAD program, uploaded the Gerber file output to the Seeed Studio website, and ordered 5 (the minimum quantity) boards for $19. Three to six weeks later, the boards showed up, apparently after a wild weekend in Singapore, looking just like I'd drafted! I soldered one up, powered it up...and realized I'd omitted one trace wire and one resistor.
Whoopsie! Good thing I'm a very forgiving customer to myself.
A couple Whoopsie Wires later and it was transmitting an external thermocouple reading to the cryocooler! It does this by simulating a resistance between two pins on the cryocooler's main control board. These pins are normally connected to the thermistor in the Superlink's Dewar. This thermistor's resistance varies between roughly 5 to 12 kiloohms in the normal working temperature range of the cryocooler. I made a circuit consisting of a 12K resistor in parallel with two optoisolators, one in series with a 12K resistor and one in series with an 800K resistor. Both optoisolators are controlled by an Arduino PWM pins, and open/close the path to give an effective resistance that corresponds to the proper temperature. A capacitor is installed across the positive and negative leads to smooth out the PWM pulses.


Two optoisolators are used because when I tried with just one, the Arduino's 8-bit PWM output wasn't fine enough to adequately control the output when the temperature was close to the lower end of the range. The second optoisolator is in series with a much higher value resistor, and thereby contributes a much smaller signal to the output. Playing around with the values, 800K was approximately the correct value to make the fine output roughly linear between the coarse pulses, giving it roughly 12 bits or so of usable PWM output range, which is fine enough for this purpose. I used optoisolators rather than transistors because I don't know what's going on in the thermistor measuring circuit - I didn't want to take any chances with frying anything on either side with weird voltages.

The Arduino (actually an Ardweeny arduino clone) also connects to the cryocooler's serial interface to read the temperature it just attempted to transmit to the cryocooler, correcting it if it's off. It also reads the power output to the cryocooler. I added a nice little OLED display to show the measured temperature, temperature reported by the cryocooler, and the cryocooler power, so it doesn't need to be hooked up to the computer to read these values. I also added an on/off switch to allow me to soft shut down the cryocooler through its software before turning off its power. This should help avoid damage from hard stops.

The OLED in Alluring Aqua
I now have a self-contained, mobile liquid air generating machine! First order of business is to (of course...) make liquid nitrogen ice cream! I can't wait to see how the most expensive bowl of ice cream I've ever had tastes! After that, it's back to the drawing board to work up a way to liquefy gases other than air.



Update: Aw hell ya

I've loaded the board design (with corrections to my original errors) and the Arduino code here.

The other parts of the quixotic Cryocooler quest are here - Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 and Part 4

4 comments:

  1. Where did you put the cooling fan int this setup? Or did you convert to water cooling?

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  2. The cooling fan is on the back side of the top wooden box (you can see a pic about 2/3 of the way down the page here - http://tinkeringpete.blogspot.com/2015/12/liquid-air.html )

    I stayed with air cooling because it seemed like too much hassle to convert it to liquid cooling for relatively minor efficiency gains.

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  3. How lowdoes your temperature measurement get? I have a type T TC on a aluminum rod that's attached to the cold tip. At the bottom of the rod I am at -192 C. I think i need it to get colder.

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    Replies
    1. I'm using a type K thermocouple with a MAX31855 thermocouple amplifier, which nominally will go down to -200 C. It did need calibration, as the raw output indicates only -140 C while the thermocouple is in liquid air. It sounds like yours is reading pretty close to true - raw air liquefies at a temperature a bit higher than pure nitrogen due to the oxygen content.

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