To save me re-inventing the wheel and to get my project running quickly, has anyone done any GUI based round angular gauges before?
I am looking for something to run on a Cobra 2 with 4.3" LCD that will display and alarm me when the gas runs low in my cooker. My good steaks were ruined last weekend when the gas ran out during cooking.
I will fit a sensor in place of the little manual gauge so that I can read the sensors current. The sensor is IS rated for explosion use and I am using a Zener Barrier in case anyone is wondering about the safety side of this. The Cobra 2 in the enclosure will be located about 3 meters away in a “safe” area.
Will do. It’s not a cheap option if you want the safety though. I just chose this option as my work uses these IS sensors and I happen to have one lying around. The Zener Barrier too is not cheap.
If you are not too concerned about IS then Honeywell have a small sensor that would work. It’s probably OK for home use but I wouldn’t recommend this for commercial work.
PX2CN2XX250PSCHX is $85US on digikey. $283AU on Element14. Wow. I’m happy to spoil a batch of beans if it gets to that. That’s less than $30 (usually more like $15). I’d have to kill a lot of beans to make that worthwhile. Now passing on this idea
So that pricey bad boy sensor comes back as a pressure sensor, but what are you measuring? Isn’t the vapor pressure of the LPG/GPL constant until you almost run the tank dry? Or are you measuring the liquid pressure at the bottom of the tank? I’m a software guy, often full of gas, but not fully understanding its management and measurement, so apologies if that’s a naive question.
If we are talking about small 20kg (or so) tanks and a home application, could you not use a strain gauge to weigh the tank? Or for small and large tanks at home, couldn’t you use a string of temp sensors to detect the fluid level from the outside of the tank (like those cheap stick-on liquid crystal level indicators)? Certainly not industrial-rated ideas, and for the sake of not charring your landscaping, you would still want to be pretty careful about implementing these approaches, but I would think these would be much cheaper approaches and still effective.
@ mcalsyn. The regulator has a small dial gauge on it that measures the actual bottle pressure. I use the 57Kg tanks here. The 20Kg ones are not safe around here.
I will remove the dial gauge and install the sensor which has the same 1/8" NPT fitting.
As I said, I have the parts lying around so no costs to me
@ Brett, where’s your Gadgeteer hat for this. Cost is not issue when we want to hook something up just to monitor it
The Cobra 2 in the enclosure will be located about 3 meters away in a “safe” area.
This is easily past it