1. Building OpenTempescope

In this tutorial, you will build the OpenTempescope box. After this section, you will have a box that can replicate rain, clouds, sunlight, and lightning.

In the first part "Building the Casing" you will build the acrylic casing.

You will then build the electronics, and finally put everything together.

The entire building process could take somewhere between 3~10 weekends.

Please note that the building process is still very premature, and a lot of the steps involve much hacking.

Please be warned that the final product is a machine that uses moving water and a 24V DC power supply. This means that, if constructed poorly, you risk harming yourself or others due to electric shocks, fires, or water damage. Neither the admins nor the supporters of this open source project will take any responsibility for any damages incurred as a result of constructing or using OpenTempescope.

Feel free to contact me anytime with questions or suggestions.

Overview of the box

Before you get started with the construction, it would help for you to know how the entire systems will fit together in the end. This subsection describes the overview of the OpenTempescope box, and how each part does what.

Terminology of parts

The OpenTempescope box is composed of 5 areas as indicated in the above diagram:

• The Sky Area

  This part should be hidden from view in the final product. The purpose of this part is to hold the full colour LED to show the colour of the sky and lightning.

• Rain tube

  There is an "S" shaped pipe with holes in the sky area that gets water pushed up from the Reservoir, and drips down water as droplets.

• The Stage

  The Stage is the only visible part of the inside of the Tempescope. This is where it rains, and clouds loom. There is actually an acrylic pipe running up from the Reservoir to the Rain Bucket, and wires leading up to the Sky Area for the LEDs, but constructed correctly, they should be near-invisible from a distance.

• Reservoir

  The Reservoir holds all of the water used for making rain and clouds, as well as a water pump (the black object), a mist diffuser (the white object), and an air fan to take in air from the outside. The entire area is usually submerged in water, and hidden from view by a splash guard. There is also a hole on the side that leads to the Control Box, for allowing cables through.

  The water pump pumps water from up inside the reservoir, through the PVC pipe (visible on the left), up the acrylic pipe in the Stage, into the Rain Bucket.

  The mist diffuser, when turned on, creates mist from the water inside the Reservoir, which then gets forced up to the Stage by the fan.

  The fan intakes air from outside of the box to force mist up from the Reservoir area to the Stage.

  

• Control Box

  This is where all of the electronics are housed. There is a hole leading out to the Reservoir (which must, obviously, be sealed very tight!), and a DC power outlet to the outside. Makers are urged to take all precautions (i.e lots of sealing) so that whatever happens, no water can get into the Control Box.

  The electronics is very simple. A 24V (2A) DC input is fed into the circuit, which powers the mist diffuser. The 24V is then stepped down to 12V to power the water pump, and then stepped down again to 5V to power the microprocessor (an ATmega328P). There is also a Bluetooth LE module that receives control commands from an iOS device.

  

If you are ready, lets get started with building the casing!