05 August 2007 - MICROCONTROLLERS (original) (raw)

08:36 pm - I'm looking for a bit of guidance on choosing a microcontroller.

Overview: To light my water cooling rig with a color corresponding to the water temperature.

The main reservoir in my water cooling system has an acrylic top and bottom. The bottom section has a predrilled whole meant for an LED. My plan is to mount either a dual color LED(red, blue) in this hole. Or drill a second whole and mount 2(again red, blue). Also I will be adding a thermosistor(or some other temp sensor band-gap, etc.) to the loop for temperature sensing.
I would like to have some kind of microcontroller/basic stamp/RISC CPU+Dog watch the thermosistor value(or some kind of interpreter hooked up to the thermosistor) and vary the intensity of the two LED's accordingly. So when the system detects say a temperature of 30C and below only the Blue LED will be lite. But once 35C or more is reached it should slowly add in the red LED while dialing down the blue LED until say 50C. At which point I would like the red LED to be fully lit. I would imagine through the use of 2 PWM channels or output to some kind of external PWM controller. The system will run off the computers powersupply as 12, 5, and 3.3 volts are all readily available.
( a bit more under the cutCollapse )