DorkbotPDX people doing strange things with electricity

I populated one of the temperature controller boards, did some testing and then loaded the PID software and tried out the IR sensor. So far, everything seems to be working. I don't have any of the thermocouple chips to try out so that will have to await the next parts order. But so far, so good. I'll be happy to help anyone get their board built out and running.

Edit-

The temperature controller PC boards have arrived. I was amazed at the interest. In the end, fifteen of the boards were requested. There have been a few people who have asked for them since the order was placed so I'll probably do another order of the boards in the next PCB order.

I've done another iteration of the temperature controller board. I decided I really wanted to provide mounting holes and that caused me to rearrange the board layout a fair amount. I decided to try to get most of the components on the side of the board which would be covered up with the LCD (assuming you put a female header on the board to plug the LCD into). The image shows a standard 16x2 LCD part from the Sparkfun library (the big rectangle) and how it would fit onto the board.

I've done a quick first pass on the PCB design for the temperature controller. There are a few things I'd like some feedback on:

I finished building a project box and adding inputs to allow the closed loop temperature controller (http://www.instructables.com/id/Closing-the-Loop-on-Surface-Mount-Solder...) to stand alone (without needing to be connected to a computer to control it).

I did another run of the LCD enabled DorkBoard design that I posted earlier. In this run, I made a few small changes to add a standard 6 pin AVR ISP header and put in the reset capacitor (a 0603 part which can be solder bridged if you have a programmer like a Benito which does the reset in software). The Eagle files are attached.

After taking Jim Larson's workshop on surface mount soldering, I wanted to set up my own hot plate system for reflow soldering. But rather than use an open loop temperature control system like Jim was using at the time, I thought I'd take a crack at a closed loop control system. The first problem was that I didn't have a convenient temperature sensor which would go up to over 200°C as would be needed to reflow lead free solder paste.

So have you ever wanted to use one of the ubiquitous 16 pin LCDs in a project but found it a pain to wire up all the signals (not to mention the pot for contrast control and maybe a backlight control as well)? Me too. Sure there are serial backpacks and other ways to cut down on the number of pins and connections that it takes to run the LCD but sometimes that seems like overkill for a simple one-off project.