Anyways, I’ve been running tests with the viscometer and everything is working great so far. I’ve got the temperature sensors working and the conditioning of them with OP-amps has worked like a charm. Though I find that the read value from the ADC is pretty jumpy.

Anyways, as reference, here some photos.

The Whole Deal

Temp Conditioner

Motor Linearity

Here’s a blow by blow of how it was built.

First I took the thing apart. The wire itself is pretty tough to chew on so I kept it in there so I can save the lamp itself. The lamp was bought from Wal-mart for about $18.

Here’s a blurry pic of the control board I designed. It’s generic in that it can take both digital and switch input and output 200ma per channel on 3 outputs. It’s nothing special but it’s small enough and it works. The MCU on it is a PIC16F505, not a great MCU but it works.

And here’s the casing on the base. Inside was some sort of bizarre weight made of something I did not want to cut.  I took the guts out and popped two 5/8 holes for the buttons. I didn’t have a proper drill so I used a forstner bit, not ideal bit it worked surprisingly well.

I inserted the guts of the machine and had to follow the existing wire in and keep the controller towards the front. As you can see, it’s pretty ugly, as well I used hot glue to affix the boards to some wood which was then affixed with hot glue to the inner casing. It’s not an ideal solution but it relieves me of having to use bolts and it was fast.

And there you have it, it seems to work. No fire, or smoke and it works as programmed (kind of). Now I’ll have to go to work and build a new base, one to keep the unit steady, also I think I’ll add a little piezoelectric tweeter for audible confirmation of time selected.

Anyways, I’m glad I made it this far on the project in such a short amount of time.