As I went about thinking on how to assemble the circuitry together to make a presentable project, I wasn't too happy with the idea of using the extended pin header for attaching the sensor board. However, I found that the GPIO connector on the Pi will happily take an old computer disk cable. Luckily, I had one of these hanging around.
The only gotcha with this technique is that the connector rows end up swapped around if you connect the sensor board with the connector mounted as it comes originally. However, apparently the creators thought of this. The connector that comes with the sensor board can be turned around and installed on the top side of the board without any soldering! In this case, the pins make the right connections with a simple male-male pin header like the one seen off to the right in the picture above.
To make things organized and presentable, I decided to use an Adafruit PermaProto board for the original Raspberry Pi that I had laying around. It doesn't allow for connecting any of the higher numbered pins, but luckily all I need are included.
Working with what I had at hand, I installed the left over single row male pin header to cover the needed pins. To make things foolproof, I soldered the PIR sensor onto the proto board with the idea of drilling a hole in the side of the enclosure to allow the PIR to peak through. To make things fit in the desired enclosure, I cut a few rows off one end of the proto board.
I installed a screw-down type connector on the proto board to handle the connections with the fog machine remote control and added wire to connect the PIR sensor to the Raspberry Pi header.
Finally, I soldered on the relay board that I built before. At this point I'm wishing I had just waited and installed the relay directly on the main proto board. However, I might as well go with what I have already.
In the next installment, I will finish up the build of the Foginator 2000.
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