For my electronics assignment I created a distance sensor that, when activated, powers a small heater. The heater would be placed near the neck of the user so that the Weightless Chair would have the additional feature of warming the users upper back and neck during use. I have observed that heat (warm showers and electric heating pads) help my wife alleviate some of her neck pain and I thought it would be helpful to have an electric heating pad build in. 

Some frustrations I came across included figuring out how much resistance was most appropriate for the resistors in the heating element. I decided on 4 x 27 Ohm resistors in order to reduce the amount of heat and possibility of damage to the electronics. I also am using the Serial Monitor feature in the code section of Tinkercad, along with a temperature sensor, in order to monitor and print out the temperature. I could only get the temperature to print to the Serial Monitor though and spent a while trying to find a component in Tinkercad that would display the output of the Serial Monitor, which I couldn’t find.

Here’s a link to the Tinkercad Design:

https://www.tinkercad.com/things/lBi4cBADEty-copy-of-test/editel?sharecode=uoqsrUhN1ysejbbdKtPL_997PyNBGGf8ihvd1hHzpLg

Below are screenshots of the electrical set up with the working simulation: 

Full View

 

Close-Up of Distance Sensor

 

 

Close-Up of Heater / Temperature Sensor

 

Close-Up of Serial Monitor

 

Resources:

www.alanzucconi.com/2016/08/02/arduino-heater-1
www.alanzucconi.com/2016/08/02/arduino-heater-2

Lesson Seven


https://learn.adafruit.com/tmp36-temperature-sensor

Published by PATRICK SCERRI

16 thoughts on “Distance Sensor Heater”

  1. 4 27Ohm resistors in parallel are equivalent to a 6.75 Ohm resistor. If the entire 5 volts was across that it would have 0.74 Amps, quite a bit for the Arduino but maybe the right range for a heater. It would be a power of 3.7 Watts. The way you have it wired it would not be the entire 5 volts across the heater resistors as the LED is part of that loop. If you did them in parallel it would be easier to calculate and analyze. The LCD display can be used as an output for text. If you want to move forward with this project I could help you clean it up and maybe add some more functionality.

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  4. Similar to what Professor Kher mentioned, what is triggering the heat response? You could use a switch for the basic, then buttons to increase heat, which would help distribute the power as well. By the way, there is a display element that is not in Tinkercad Circuits, as Ashley mentioned. There’s a fair amount of code for those, if you are interested in following up with that option, but output simulation might be harder!

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