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  • Author Author: Jan Cumps
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Arduino Day - suggestion: DIN housing with LAN, CAN and LoRa

Jan Cumps

For Arduino Day, belated, a few photos of a project I'm working on.

Arduino MKR 1310 LoRa with Ethernet shield and CAN-shield. In a DIN mounted housing and a LoRa range antenna.

image

It is going to be part of a light industrial test setup.

 

The housing is Arduino MKR DIN rail housing from e14 member .

Inside:

Arduino MKR 1310Arduino MKR 1310 for LoRa, with a MOLEX 105262MOLEX 105262 868/915 flex antenna.

Arduino MKR ETH shieldArduino MKR ETH shield

Arduino MKR CAN shieldArduino MKR CAN shield

 

image

 

This will be one of a few replaceable options.

I also have a TI CC1100 with a rod antenna, put in a smaller DIN housing, that can do sub-1 GHz duty,

an Avnet SmartEdge IIOTConnect that can do CAN, WiFi  and Ethernet,

and a DIN mounted Raspberry Pi that can do Ethernet, Wifi and can be paired with my home-made CAN driver,

 

image

Happy Arduino Day

  • member, Comment on this comment, if you see this in your notifications, or on the e14 homepage Blog feed.
    (test for a feedback request I raised)

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    This is how that one with the antenna was mounted:

    image

    It's too long to fit on the upper rail (or if I mounted it on the underside if the box: to fit on the lower rail). And it restricts part of rail above a little.
    But I got decent reception. Kilometres.

  • in reply to jc2048

    This is true, and the DIN box I'm using only allows for two configurations: like I show, and just around the corner of that. Both have the antenna horizontal. Either parallel to earth or in a 90° angle. The housing isn't large enough to have this antenna in the vertical postition. I'll have to custom-mount the DIN rail up-down.

    For the horizontal mount option, I used this one 'from an older project):

    image

    This one has its own restrictions on where you can mount it without having to drill holes in the DIN cabin.

  • If that's a DIN rail box and your DIN rail is horizontal (usually the case), then the arrangement you show also places the antenna horizontal. Problem with that is that there are then going to be partial nulls in the response along the plane of the antenna. (The antenna is basically a dipole, though there's a bit of zig-zagging and the ends folded round, which will modify the radiation pattern a little.) You might consider having the antenna vertical (both ends of the link - remember that the radio waves are polarised, so both ends need to match). If you get it vertical, it will be much more of an omnidirectional pattern and you'll be throwing the energy out parallel to the ground (which is usually where you want the energy to go). The obvious exception to that might be if you had the devices one above another on the floors of a building where there then would be an argument for directing energy up and down.

    This document shows their test results.

    https://www.molex.com/pdm_docs/as/AS-105262-0001-001.pdf

    See section 4.5 for the 2d patterns. I might be wrong, but they may have X and Y swapped on the XY plot (but that doesn't negate the general point I'm making above). Perhaps someone with a better knowledge of RF stuff than me might comment.