automation

169 Articles

Heat Pump Control That Works

September 4, 2023 by 33 Comments

Heat pumps are taking the world by storm, and for good reason. Not only are they many times more efficient than electric heaters, but they can also be used to provide cooling in the summer. Efficiency aside, though, they’re not perfectly designed devices, largely with respect to their climate control abilities especially for split-unit setups. Many of them don’t have remotely located thermostats to monitor temperature in an area, and rely on crude infrared remote controls as the only user interface. Looking to make some improvements to this setup, [Danilo] built a setup more reminiscent of a central HVAC system to control his.

Based on an ESP32 from Adafruit with an integrated TFT display, the device is placed away from the heat pump to more accurately measure room temperature. A humidity sensor is also included, as well as an ambient light sensor to automatically reduce the brightness of the display at night. A large wheel makes it quick and easy to adjust the temperature settings up or down. Armed with an infrared emitter, the device is capable of sending commands to the heat pump to more accurately control the climate of the room than the built-in controls are able to do. It’s also capable of logging data and integrating with various home automation systems.

While the device is optimized for the Mitsubishi heat pumps that [Danilo] has, only a few lines of code need to be changed to get this to work with other brands. This is a welcome improvement for those frustrated with the inaccurate climate controls of their heat pumps, and since it integrates seamlessly into home automation systems could also function in tandem with other backup heat sources, used in cold climates when it’s too cold outside to efficiently run the heat pump. And, if you don’t have a heat pump yet, you can always try and build your own.

Automation For The NES

August 15, 2023 by 11 Comments

Old hardware might not be anywhere close to as powerful as modern technology, but it does have a few perks. Aesthetics can of course drive the popularity of things like retro gaming systems, but the ease of understanding the underpinnings of their inner workings is also critical. The Nintendo Entertainment System, now nearly four decades old, is a relatively simple machine by modern standards and this lends the system to plenty of modifications, like this controller that allows the system to be somewhat automated.

The original NES controller used a fairly simple shift register to send button presses to the system. The system outputted a latch signal to the controller, the shift register would take as input the current state of the buttons, and then would send them one-by-one to the system at a rate of around 1000 times per second. These signals can be sent without a controller easily enough, too. This build uses a CD4021 shift register, which is the same as the original controller, but instead of reading button states it accepts its inputs from a separate computer via a latching circuit. In this case, the separate computer is a custom design that came about through adapting cassette storage for a 6502-based computer, but it could come from anything else just as easily.

With this system in place, it’s possible to automate gameplay to some extent. Since the system can’t get feedback about the game in its current state, it requires some precise timing to get it to play the game well, and a lot of tuning needs to go into it. This isn’t just a one-off, either. Similar methods are how we get tool-assisted speedruns of games and although these are often done in emulators instead of on real hardware, they can result in some interesting exploits.

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Automated Drone Takes Care Of Weeds

August 10, 2023 by 38 Comments

Commercial industrial agriculture is responsible for providing food to the world’s population at an incredibly low cost, especially when compared to most of human history when most or a majority of people would have been involved in agriculture. Now it’s a tiny fraction of humans that need to grow food, while the rest can spend their time in cities and towns largely divorced from needing to produce their own food to survive. But industrial agriculture isn’t without its downsides. Providing inexpensive food to the masses often involves farming practices that are damaging to the environment, whether that’s spreading huge amounts of synthetic, non-renewable fertilizers or blanket spraying crops with pesticides and herbicides. [NathanBuildsDIY] is tackling the latter problem, using an automated drone system to systemically target weeds to reduce his herbicide use.

The specific issue that [NathanBuildsDIY] is faced with is an invasive blackberry that is taking over one of his fields. To take care of this issue, he set up a drone with a camera and image recognition software which can autonomously fly over the field thanks to Ardupilot and a LiDAR system, differentiate the blackberry weeds from other non-harmful plants, and give them a spray of herbicide. Since drones can’t fly indefinitely, he’s also build an automated landing pad complete with a battery swap and recharge station, which allows the drone to fly essentially until it is turned off and uses a minimum of herbicide in the process.

The entire setup, including drone and landing pad, was purchased for less than $2000 and largely open-source, which makes it accessible for even small-scale farmers. A depressing trend in farming is that the tools to make the work profitable are often only attainable for the largest, most corporate of farms. But a system like this is much more feasible for those working on a smaller scale and the automation easily frees up time that the farmer can use for other work. There are other ways of automating farm work besides using drones, though. Take a look at this open-source robotics platform that drives its way around the farm instead of flying.

Thanks to [PuceBaboon] for the tip!

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Automate Your Pin Header Chopping Chores Away

July 29, 2023 by 7 Comments

In most cases, cutting pin headers is a pretty simple job to tackle with a pair of cutters or even your bare fingers. But if you’re doing a lot of it, like for kitting up lots of projects for customers, then you might want to look at something like this automatic pin header cutter.

Even if you don’t need to follow [Mr. Innovative]’s lead on this, it’s worth taking a look at the video below, which has a couple of cool ideas that are probably applicable to other automation projects, especially those where lots of small parts are handled. Processing begins with a hopper that holds a stack of header strips over what we’d call a “reverse guillotine,” consisting of a spring-loaded plunger riding on a cam. A header strip is pushed out of the hopper to expose the specified number of terminals, the cam rotates and raises the plunger, and the correct length header is snapped off.

For our money, the neatest part of this build is the feed mechanism for the hopper. Rather than anything complicated like a rack-and-pinion, [Mr. Innovative] opted for a pusher made from a stiff yet flexible strip of plastic, which is forced along the bottom of the hopper by a pair of stepper-driven drive rollers. The plastic pusher is stored rolled up in a spiral fixture so it doesn’t take up much room.

Overall, it’s a simple and largely effective design. [Mr. Innovative] does express a little dissatisfaction with some aspects of the build, though; it looks like the stack of header strips needs a little weight on top of it to keep them feeding properly, and we notice a couple of iterations of the cutting mechanism in the video. The cut headers do seem to either fly off into the stratosphere or stay attached to each other, which could lead to jamming problems.

But still, it’s a solid design and reminds us of some other projects by [Mr. Innovative], like this SMD tape slicer or a CNC gear cutter.

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Adding Two Axes Makes CNC Router More Than The Sum Of Its Parts

July 26, 2023 by 20 Comments

The problem with building automated systems is that it’s hard to look at any problem and not see it in terms of possible automation solutions. Come to think of it, that’s probably less of a bug and more of a feature, but it’s easy to go overboard and automate all the things, which quickly becomes counterproductive in terms of time and money.

If you’re clever, though, a tactical automation solution can increase your process efficiency without breaking the budget. That’s where [Christopher Helmke] seems to have landed with this two-axis add-on fixture for his CNC router. The rig is designed to solve the problem of the manual modification needed to turn off-the-shelf plastic crates into enclosures for his line of modular automation components, aspects of which we’ve featured before. The crates need holes drilled in them and cutouts created in their sides for displays and controls. It’s a job [Christopher] tackled before with a drill and a jigsaw, with predictable results.

To automate the job without going overboard, [Christopher] came up with a tilting turntable that fits under the bed of the CNC router and sticks through a hole in the spoil board. The turntable is a large, 3D printed herringbone gear driven by a stepper and pinion gear. A cheap bearing keeps costs down, while a quartet of planetary gears constrain the otherwise wobbly platform. The turntable also swivels 90 degrees on a herringbone sector gear; together, the setup adds pitch and roll axes to the machine that allow the spindle access to all five sides of the crates.

Was it worth the effort? Judging by the results in the video below, we’d say so, especially given the number of workpieces that [Christopher] has to process. Add in the budget-conscious construction that doesn’t sacrifice precision too much, and this one seems like a real automation win.

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A Lightweight Smart Home Server

June 6, 2023 by 31 Comments

Working towards automating a few things in a home often seems simple on the surface, but it’s easy for these projects to snowball into dozens of sensors and various servos, switches, and cameras strewn about one’s living space. The same sort of feature creep sneaks into some of the more popular self-hosted home server platforms as well, with things like openHAB requiring so much computing power that they barely function on something like a Raspberry Pi. [Paulo] thought there should be a more lightweight way of tackling a project like this, and set about building his own smart home server with help from some interesting software.

The project is based around the Dirigera hub from Ikea, partially because [Paulo] is planning to use other smart home devices from Ikea as he can easily find them where he is, and also because these devices tend to use Zigbee, a non-proprietary communications standard. This means that if he ever wants to swap out the hub for another one in the future, it won’t be difficult to do. From here the major hurdle is that using the default software from these devices is fairly limiting, so [Paulo] reached for a Raspbee 2 Zigbee gateway for use with a Raspberry Pi and an extremely lightweight and customizable web server called Mako to make this happen. Using Lua as the high-level language to tie everything together he was able to easily deploy the server to control the Ikea hub and devices and automate them in any way he sees fit.

While it is true that software like openHAB and others already exists to do virtually any home automation task that could be imagined, if you’re looking to do something with a bare minimum of computing power something like [Paulo]’s solution is likely going to be the fastest and most reliable method of getting a few things automated around the home. If you’re looking for something completely open source and built from the ground up, though, we have seen a few alternative smart home solutions like this one which don’t rely on any proprietary hardware or software, but do take a little bit more effort on the user’s part.

Battery Bot Makes Sure Cordless Tool Packs Are Always Topped Up

May 24, 2023 by 19 Comments

There was a time not that long ago when every tool was cordless. But now, cordless power tools have proliferated to the point where the mere thought of using a plain old wrist-twisting screwdriver is enough to trigger a bout of sympathetic repetitive injury. And the only thing worse than that is to discover that the batteries for your tools are all dead.

As [Lance] from the “Sparks and Code” channel freely admits, the fact that his impressive collection of batteries is always dead is entirely his fault, and that’s what inspired his automatic battery charging robot. The design is pretty clever; depleted batteries go into a hopper, under which is a 3D-printed sled. Batteries drop down into the sled, which runs the battery out from under the hopper to the charging station, which is just the guts of an old manual charger attached to a lead screw to adjust the height of the charging terminals for different size batteries. When the battery is charged, the sled pushes it a little further into an outfeed hopper before going back to get another battery from the infeed side.

Of course, that all vastly understates the amount of work [Lance] had to put into this. He suffered through a lot of “integration hell” problems, like getting the charger properly connected to the Arduino running the automation. But with a lot of tweaking, he can now just dump in a bunch of depleted packs and let the battery bot handle everything. The video after the break shows all the gory details.

Of course, there’s another completely different and much simpler solution to the dead battery problem.

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