Nothing New

[Olly]

Hi all, I hate lots of fiddly wiring inside enclosures so have been working on a small and simple PI board which draws inspiration from some of the great projects on this site. (Hammerhead, Baracuda and the Arduino Nano PI), and also adds one or two little tweaks from my side. The main idea was to keep it as small as possible and have all pots and switches mounted directly onto a 50mm x 80mm PCB. This does involve surface mount components unfortunately but I've kept resistor sizes at 0805 so not too tricky to assemble with a steady hand (and a good magnifying lamp).

I've built up the first one and so far testing has been very positive - here are some pics as a little teaser.

Beachmaster.pdf

Will post further pics of the assembled board and some field testing reasults once I've got it all nicely wrapped up.

Enjoy

[Qiaozhi]

Looks good.

[Mr.Jaick]

nice work
some suggestions:

1) get rid of the trimmer pots once you settled on the final value
2) use axial electrolytic caps over ic's
3) use smd mosfet
4) use low profile connectors instead of phoenix

these will reduce the final dimensions to half
at the end you'll end up having a detector as small as equinox 800 or similar sized VLF. (battery included)

[Olly]

More Pics

Thanks for the feedback guys, mch appreciated.
I've managed to get it all together and been out in the back garden testing - looking very promising so far.
Set at 1kHz frequency and 50uS pulse width, depth of detection is pretty much as expected - I can 'see' a 1 euro coin at around 12" in air and I can find all my test pennies in the garden with ease. The pinpoint function also works surprisingly well.

I've still not found any great advantage to being able to alter the frquency, but will experiment a bit more later.

Here are a few more pics showing the assembled board and how it all comes together in the completed unit.
I also made a little rechargeable battery pack which mounts on the underside below the arm-rest.








Regards

[MartyJ1963]

Love the size of that PCB! Is ths detector available as a kit? Nice job Olly! Regards, Marty.

[walkman]

Congratulations, good job.

[surfdetector]

This looks really great. Are you going to share your Gerbers?
Cheers

[Olly]

Gerbers

More than happy to share my gerbers with the forum.

beachmaster.zip

Please bear in mind that although the detector is working pretty well, it is early days and there is still testing and optimising to be done.
I am busy compiling a full BOM, circuit description and assembly guide and will publish these once done.

Regards

[F117]

Very nice job and professional looking construction

[Qiaozhi]

More than happy to share my gerbers with the forum.

[ATTACH]56612[/ATTACH]

Please bear in mind that although the detector is working pretty well, it is early days and there is still testing and optimising to be done.
I am busy compiling a full BOM, circuit description and assembly guide and will publish these once done.

Regards

I think this is worth adding to the Projects section of the forum.
Would you like me to create an entry there for the Beachmaster?
Then (when you have the BOM, circuit description, and assembly guide complete) you can post all the details there.

[Olly]

I think this is worth adding to the Projects section of the forum.
Would you like me to create an entry there for the Beachmaster?
Then (when you have the BOM, circuit description, and assembly guide complete) you can post all the details there.

If you think it's worthy of the projects section, then by all means - thanks.
Regards

[Qiaozhi]

If you think it's worthy of the projects section, then by all means - thanks.
Regards

It's live -> Beachmaster PI

[Olly]

I'm honoured

[surfdetector]

More than happy to share my gerbers with the forum.

[ATTACH]56612[/ATTACH]

Please bear in mind that although the detector is working pretty well, it is early days and there is still testing and optimising to be done.
I am busy compiling a full BOM, circuit description and assembly guide and will publish these once done.

Regards

Many thanks. I was in need of a Winter PI project.
Cheers