project designer

I’m looking for someone to help me with a timer project. I have no experience at all and would need you to build it. Please read further and let me know if your interested and what you would charge for completion, Thank you! Tom

Scope: record time that enclosed trailer door is open. I need to track up to 20 open/close cycles of my trailer door for billing purposes.

Would need to be able to download recorded data on a usb drive or ?? to transport back to the office for review.

The simpler the better.

Not sure if the ardunio board is the way to go but from the u tube videos i saw, I would love to try it.

You can reply to this post or directly via email: tom@dupageturf.com - Thank you!

Have you studied anything about peripherals for arduino?

Im sorta noobish on these myself, but have fairly extensive engineering background with wildly varying types of hardware and software interfaces, TTL driven circuits, CMOS logic, etc… so I will take a crack at an answer…

I would suggest a Dallas Semiconductor Real Time Clock (RTC) reference to generate an accurate duration time stamp variable, then log it to an SD card shield based logger. Make a primal menu front end to branch between a couple needed functions, like choose to “run” which puts the clock interfaced module into loop that watches a door switch circuit to go high or low and then return to prior high/low state, then takes time reference and stashes that integer onto SD card. Loop then resumes watching door switch circuit all over again…(rinse, repeat)

Alternate button on primal front menu could offer to add up the stored time duration integers stored on SD, and present tally onscreen nice and pretty-like…while also taking tally and stashing it on SD card in a different directory for “duty-shift” totals that can be accessed 3rd party anytime later on.

Any other added functions you could think would be nice additions to add, just make another button.

So its like a group of individual tasks (loops) that can be halted and sent on down the ‘street’ (program) to another house (loop). At the termination (break) of any function loop, offer another simple menu or single button to confirm thats what you want before breaking out. Just to add perceived quality (complexity or “fat”)

Its a really simple thing you need, and if you wanted to go fancy, I dont see that even adding an I/R or ethernet/wifi access to the SD directory would complicate things too much.