Homemade Cadence Cards

The design of my homemade panel my requires homemade cards to “code” the panel to the selected cadences. I have (so far) made 4 Marchtime cards at rates of 20, 60, 90, and 120 BPM, as well as Temporal 3 and Temporal 4 cards. The rates are definitely not perfect, but for hand-soldered circuits on small pieces of perf board, I would say that these cards get the job done right.

All the Marchtime cards are the same with the exception of some resistor values, the circuit is just a 555 timer in astable mode with some LEDs and a transistor thrown in. The Temporal were a tad more complicated, they needed two 74HC165 PISO shift registers and two 555s in astable mode as well as a bunch of other components. The timers are for the clock and parallel load pins. I based the Temporal card design off of the Temporal 3 card for the 2001 (2001-3053), but I am using a different timing method.

Watch this video here to see my Temporal 3 and 4 cards in action with a not so detailed explanation as seen here. I was tired at the time of recording, so I apologize in advance.

How will all this work with the panel? Well, I will be using banks of SIPO shift registers to route the selected card’s output to the appropriate NAC/s. This will be controlled by the microcontroller and each NAC can be separately programmed for a different cadence. This means a lot of shift registers (good thing I bought them in bulk).

Link to schematic diagrams will be posted in video description when available.

Wow! That’s amazing! I’ve wanted to DIY a panel for a while but didn’t because of the cost and complexity vs. buying an old MS-9200UD.

I am trying to make a more complex panel while keeping the cost down. I wanted to do this to give me all the fucntionality in the panel that I want. This includes, but is not limited to, more than enough cadences and sync protocols, several zones with 2 wire detector compatibility, supervised AC NACs with adjustable voltage along with the traditional 24VDC NACs (of course), and voice evacuation with a plethora of tone generators for any situation that may arise. This is though only going to be a hobby panel and will not in any way replace my household fire detection system.

This is a really neat project. I can’t wait to see the finished product!

What platform are you building this on? ATMEL, ARM, etc.?

I will be using an Arduino Mega 2560 with an SD card shield and a YUN shield. This will be in charge of everything except for the voice evacuation and the coder module, which will each have their own Arduino NANOs connected to the main board via serial. Anything that doesn’t need or use a microcontroller will be taken care of by one of my homemade cards.

I have more two videos in my “Homemade Panel” series, you can view those for more details.

Ah. I’m doing a custom voice evac system which reads serial data from my panel. Uses a raspberry pi and python.

I have an Pi as well. I went with the Arduino due to the amount of GPIOs on the Pi compared to the 54 digital and 16 analog pins I get on my 2560, which also has 4 hardware serial ports for communication with other devices. I also chose it for the voltage compatibility (3.3v/5v) for other components I am going to use (the LCDs for example).

The Yun shield I am using will not only allow me to upload programs without a USB cable, it will also allow me to remotely program and control the panel from a computer or related device from a near or distant location. The SD card allows me to keep all my settings when the panel resets or powers down.

That’s pretty smart. Do you mind sharing the code you have so far? Here’s mine: https://gitlab.jelimoore.xyz/jelimoore/smart-voice-evac. I’m about to commit the code I have right now after I post it since i haven’t committed in a while.

I need to rewrite the whole thing after a few hardware changes I made. The addition of the Yun shield is one of the main changes. I will try to get schematics and code available around the same time. Don’t worry, I didn’t have much written anyway.