“Click And See” project that make it easy to search for parts, from the Modulowo Blog (in Polish):
“Click And See“ is a system supporting the search of electronic components. The idea came during yesterday’s shopping in one of the electronics stores, cabinets with electronic components fill the entire wall. When buying several different components, the seller needs time to find them first in your computer, then in the appropriate bins, and the queue of customers getting longer… To facilitate this, I designed a simple, wireless and easy to expand the system to highlight the drawer of the element that want to buy.
On the technical side
Cabinet sizes are different, I used a cabinet with 16 drawers that are easy to connect and build, highlighted by 16 LEDs in blue, controlled 16 -channel PWM LED driver (MOD – 23.Z) with the I2C interface. These systems are 7-bit addressable, so theoretically one I2C bus can be connected to more than 100 of these cabinets. LED driver is connected to the platform Raspberry Pi with a Wi-Fi network. The platform acts as a web server, connect to typing the address in the web browser on your computer. As a result, we have wireless access to the system. The use of MySQL database easier, creating, importing and exporting base elements.
Expandability
The system uses to control the I2C interface with the possibility of addressing the cabinets , so adding another cabinet to the system, simply connect them three wires to the bus and bring power to the cabinet. The software allows you to search for connected cabinets and also detect damaged cabinets.
As part of the test, I used the power of the Raspberry Pi, but in a larger number of cabinets, you would use the additional power. The system could also find applications in other industries stores or warehouses….
Really nice,
I though of something like this as well. I saw someone that made a system with voice activation for opening up a draw for that part. But I thought a led would be a simpler system. I hadn’t worked on it in quite a while though. I did made some code that worked with Eagle bom file of project and could search some arrays to return a draw number.