10.5 Mechanical Design, Machine Design+¶
The Suck Up…¶
This page is just a quick recap of my group’s work for 2023. More details on this temporary to be permanent page.
All of us were remote, Walter and me were even in different countries/continents… Plan was to improve and automate a shop-vac system.
Team¶
I was asked to work on the electronics. As Walter had a Sparkfun relay I planned for it. That relay would control power to an AC motor. The board I designed was based on the AtTiny 412 of which Walter had some. The relay needs Vcc, Gnd and a signal to control the Gate. I don’t like leaving free pins so I left connections for 2x relays, 3x buttons (2 pulled down, 1 pulled up) and 2x full I2C connections (Vcc, Gnd, SDA and SCL) like I used on my own final project. That means the board can be used to automate a full shopvac system, from the vaccuum itself to maybe an auxiliary motor for a vaccuum table to even connect to other Micro-controllers like an ESP32.
We were working towards Walter Lenigan implementing the automation system in Honduras for his own shopvac. He’s documented his side here Individual page. Here’s a picture of him figuring out how the Sparkfun relay worked:
In the end Walter just connected an Arduino Mega to an Adafruit Bluefruit LE Shield and used that to control the relay.
JaysonBrown did a bit of everything, including setting up the project management pages and making the presentation video in the end…
Kyle-Pierre was working on a hose selection system for himself so he tried adapting it to Walter’s system.
I don’t know how far Kyle and Walter got on that.
The group work was supervised by Daniel Meyer as best as could be given that everyone was tunning in to the Chicago Fab Lab remotely.