automation

162 Articles

Automatic Garbage Can Keeps Cooking Cleaner

July 23, 2024 by 30 Comments

Over the last decade or so, we’ve been inundated with appliances with wireless or “smart” technology that is often of dubious utility. No one really needs a tablet in their refrigerator or Wi-Fi on their coffee maker. A less glamorous kitchen appliance that actually might benefit from some automation and connectivity is the garbage can, or “bin” for those speaking the Queen’s English, and [Mellow_Labs] is here to show off just how to get that done with this automatic garbage can lid.

As he explains, the real impetus behind this build is to not have to touch a dirty lid while cooking to avoid having to take time to wash one’s hands again afterwards. There are a few other design criteria as well; it has to be roommate-approved so nothing permanently attached to the lid, overly complicated, or with an unnecessary amount of wires or other fixtures. A servo with an extension sits on the lid itself, and when activated forces the lid open. A distance sensor provides basic gesture recognition and a microcontroller with wireless connectivity controls both and provides home automation integration as well. With a 3D printed case that includes a quick disconnect function for easy cleaning of the lid, the build was ready to be put into service.

The first iteration used an infrared distance sensor, but placing it by an open window caused it to continuously open and close since sunlight has the same wavelengths of light the sensor is tuned for. A quick swap with an ultrasonic sensor solved the problem, and the garbage can is working flawlessly in the kitchen now. Another appliance that is generally not targeted by off-the-shelf automation solutions is the range fume hood, but another build tackled that problem a while back.

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Automating 3D Printer Support Hardware

June 6, 2024 by 22 Comments

While 3D printers have evolved over the past two decades from novelties to powerful prototyping tools, the amount of support systems have advanced tremendously as well. From rudimentary software that required extensive manual input and offered limited design capabilities, there’s now user-friendly interfaces with more features than you could shake a stick at. Hardware support has become refined as well with plenty of options including lighting, ventilation, filament recycling, and tool changers. It’s possible to automate some of these subsystems as well like [Caelestis Workshop] has done with this relay control box.

This build specifically focuses on automating or remotely controlling the power, enclosure lighting, and the ventilation system of [Caelestis Workshop]’s 3D printer but was specifically designed to be scalable and support adding other features quickly. A large power supply is housed inside of a 3D printed enclosure along with a Raspberry Pi. The Pi controls four relays which are used to control these various pieces hardware along with the 3D printer. That’s not the only thing the Pi is responsible for, though. It’s also configured to run Octoprint, a piece of open-source software that adds web interfaces for 3D printers and allows their operation to be monitored and controlled remotely too.

With this setup properly configured, [Caelestis Workshop] can access their printer from essentially any PC, monitor their prints, and ensure that ventilation is running. Streamlining the print process is key to reducing the frustration of any 3D printer setup, and this build will go a long way to achieving a more stress-free environment. In case you missed it, we recently hosed a FLOSS Weekly episode talking about Octoprint itself which is worth a listen especially if you haven’t tried this piece of software out yet.

Supercon 2023: MakeItHackin Automates The Tindie Workflow

May 7, 2024 by 2 Comments

Selling your hardware hacks is a great way to multiply your project’s impact, get your creations into others’ hands, and contribute to your hacking-related budget while at it. If you’re good at it, your store begins to grow. From receiving a couple orders a year, to getting one almost every day – if you don’t optimize the process of mailing orders out, it might just start taking a toll on you.

That is not to say that you should worry – it’s merely a matter of optimization, and, now you have a veritable resource to refer to. At Supercon 2023, [MakeItHackin]/[Andrew] has graced us with his extensive experience scaling up your sales and making your shipping process as seamless as it could be. His experience is multifaceted, and he’s working with entire four platforms – Tindie, Lectronz, Etsy and Shopify, which makes his talk all that more valuable.

[MakeItHackin] tells us how he started out selling hardware, how his stores grew, and what pushed him to automate the shipping process to a formidable extent. Not just that – he’s developed a codebase for making the shipping experience as smooth as possible, and he’s sharing it all with us.

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A Smarter Solar Water Heater

February 25, 2024 by 80 Comments

Installing solar power at a home is a great way to reduce electricity bills, especially as the cost of solar panels and their associated electronics continue to plummet. Not every utility allows selling solar back to the grid, though, so if you’re like [Rogan] who lives in South Africa you’ll need to come up with some clever tricks to use the solar energy each day while it’s available to keep from wasting any. He’s devised this system for his water heater that takes care of some of this excess incoming energy.

A normal water heater, at least one based on electric resistive heaters, attempts to maintain a small range of temperatures within the insulated tank. If the temperature drops due to use or loss to the environment, the heaters turn on to bring the temperature back up. This automation system does essentially the same thing, but allows a much wider range of temperatures depending on the time of day. Essentially, it allows the water heater to get much hotter during times when solar energy is available, and lets it drop to lower values before running the heater on utility electricity during times when it isn’t. Using a combination ESP32 and ATtiny to both control the heater and report its temperature, all that’s left is to program Home Assistant to get the new system to interact with the solar system’s battery charge state and available incoming solar energy.

While it’s an elegantly simple system that also affords ample hot water for morning showers, large efficiency gains like this can be low-hanging fruit to even more home energy savings than solar alone provides on paper. Effectively the water heater becomes another type of battery in [Rogan]’s home, capable of storing energy at least for the day in the form of hot water. There are a few other ways of storing excess renewable energy as well, although they might require more resources than are typically available at home.

Autofeeding CNC Lathe Cranks Out Parts All By Itself

January 23, 2024 by 18 Comments

The trouble with building a business around selling low-margin widgets is that you have to find a way to make a lot of them to make it worth your while. And if the widget in question is labor-intensive to make, you’ve got to find ways to reduce your inputs. That sounds like a job for industrial automation, a solution that’s often out of reach of small shops, for all the obvious reasons. Not if you’re clever about things, though, as this fully automated CNC lathe work cell shows.

This build comes to us from the woodshop of [Maher Lagha], where he’s making wooden honey dippers. Wooden dowel blanks are dispensed from an infeed rack and chucked between centers on the headstock and pneumatic tailstock. A two-axis stage in front of the workpiece moves a tool against the spinning stock, carving out the honey dipper in just a few minutes. When the lathe work is done, the spindle stops, the tailstock pulls the honey dipper back off the headstock, and a pneumatic piston unceremoniously whacks the almost-finished part — it looks like it still needs a little manual post-processing — into a bin. Lather, rinse, repeat, profit.

[Maher] doesn’t provide many details, but just looking at the work cell shows a veritable feast of industrial automation equipment. The spindle and tailstock of the lathe sit on a bed made from a massive slab of aluminum extrusion, and the X- and Y-axes use linear rails and ballscrews. And mindful of the effects of wood chips on delicate mechanisms, [Maher] did a good job of containing the mess with a host of acrylic guards.

As we said when we saw [Maher]’s wooden coaster work cell a while back, the wood widget business must be pretty good to justify automation like this. What’s nice with both these rigs is that they look like they could be quickly reprogrammed and retooled to create other products. Pretty impressive.

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CNC Soldering Bot Handles Your Headers

September 30, 2023 by 39 Comments

Soldering pin headers by hand is a tedious task, especially when your project has a huge number of them. [iforce2d] has a large number of boards with a lot of headers, and has created a rather special CNC machine to to do the job. It’s a soldering robot, controlled by LinuxCNC and you can see it below the break.

Superficially it resembles a 3D printer made in aluminium, with an X-Y movable table and a Z-direction represented by a soldering iron and solder feeder on an arm. The solder feeder uses a Bowden tube, with a 3D-printer extruder motor pushing the solder wire down a PTFE tube and finally into a fine aluminium tube from which it’s fed to the iron tip.

Though he’s done a beautiful job of it, creating the machine is not all that’s required, because the tool path requires more attention than simply moving the iron to each pin and supplying some solder. There’s a need to consider the effect of that heat, how much each pad needs, and how much neighbouring pads contribute.

We’ve had repetitive soldering tasks just like this one though not on this scale, so we can understand the tedium this machine will relieve. We can’t however help being reminded of XKCD 1319.

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You’ve Got Mail: Automatic For The People

September 13, 2023 by 15 Comments

When we last left the post office, I told you all about various kinds of machinery the USPS uses to move mail around. Today I’m going to tell you about the time they thought they could automate nearly every function inside the standard post office — and no, it wasn’t anytime recently.

By 1953, the post office badly needed modernization. When Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield was appointed that year, he found the system essentially in shambles. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, the USPS had done absolutely no spending beyond the necessary, with little to no investment in the future. But Summerfield was an ideas man, and he had the notion to build a totally automated post office. One of them would be located in Providence, Rhode Island and be known as Project Turnkey — as in a turnkey operation. The other would be located in Oakland, California, and serve as a gateway to the Pacific.

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