ArduinoBeer

Hello friends!

It's time for a new post. I did a lot of machine parts cleaning work this last time, there was not much to write about. But I'll give you some more pictures today and less text, as a little remedial... ;)
First of all: I finally have a logo for my project!

The projects name is ArduinoBeer, right? So whats closer than taking the Arduino logo and some beer and put it together for my icon? :) Hope you like it!
I'm no graphics specialist, that's why the quality is not that good, if somebody out there is willing to make a better looking one, go for it, you'll be offered some ArduinoBeer for it!

How I already mentioned above, I did a lot of cleaning those days. I'll not post a picture of every dirty part but I'll give you an example:

Thats the draining filter. I've no idea how much dirty water had to pass it to turn a 20 cent coin golden... :)

Oh, and remember this thing?

I didn't know what it was at first. I found it out. It's a pressure box. It's used to know the water level inside the basin. When the level goes up, the air pressure increases in the little hose at it's bottom right and that pushes some membranes inside which activate switches. You'll never believe how long I had to find out which contacts mean which level... But now I'm able to read out four different levels. I've no idea yet what quantities of water they represent, but I'll test that the next days.

Once I've been done with cleaning, I started reassembling the machine. I mounted the motor yesterday evening and successfully tested it under charge, works like a charm with those TRIACs. I also mounted my control to the old control panel of the machine. The goal is, that the machine still looks good at the end. So have a look at that:

See all those holes? Ask what they're good for? Well, here you go:

I screwed the original control panel on top of my control box. The original program and temperature selectors now turn my potentiometers where one regulates the normal brewing spinning speed and the second the spin-dry speed for the end of the mashing. And what I really love is that the USB and the 5VDC connectors are hidden under the detergent and softener cover... :D

Oh, and there's one more thing...
It was a hard fight and it took me a lot of courage and strength, but I went back into objective-c and cocoa and I am proud to present:

ArduinoBeer!

Tons of kudos over to Erin Kennedy from robotgrrl.com for Matatino, an implementation of AMSerial, a collection of classes to access serial ports from cocoa, written by Andreas Mayer. Some more tons of kudos to him and his friends too! Thank you guys!


To switch on and off the relays was pretty easy, but as soon as it went over to reading out their state, the water temperature and the water level it went pretty tricky... But I now am able to entirely control my machine from ArduinoBeer. It just doesn't show any values for the temperature and the level on the picture because I didn't hook it up for the photo... :) 
I'll probably post a video next where I show you guys how everything works.


Have a nice weekend, cya soon!

heat and level

Hello fellows!
Two more little steps:
1. I let make a little adapter piece to fit my new water resistant temperature sensor in the original joint, most likely the easiest way to get accurate temperature data.
There are the original sensor, the original joint and the new sensor glued into the adapter piece:

2. Since I had to wait for the joint before testing the level sensor, I implemented and tested it with two switches on a breadboard.

Once I got the arduino reading out the switch state it was pretty easy to implement it to the big real sketch. And I had to make my little c program understand the command "lvl". The only difficulty was to find out that I need a 10kOhm resistor to put it to zero. I guess that's what they call a pull down resistor. Otherwise results were inpredictable. But once again, if I only directly headed to arduino.cc and their incredible braintrust... :)
I'll start wiring up everything definitively and be back soon!

Keep on turning!

Hey guys!

I'm slowly approaching my goal, step by step.
Once I got the TRIAC to control the motor, I hooked it up to my ultra sophisticated test equipment and it worked! Almost out of the box, if only everything was so easy...
I say that because I had some serious problems with the relays.
They always worked like a charm, until I drove them under charge. Once a 230VAC load was connected, I was able to switch them on and off once or twice, and then everything hung.
The terminal app on my mac was hanging, I was not even able to quit my little serial program with ctrl-c, I had to kill it.
The arduino needed a hard reboot, which means de- and reconnect USB.
And sometimes even the fault current switch went off.
The idea that the relay board may suck to much current came relatively soon and I tried to feed the arduino with external power, up to 12VDC, but nothing went better.
I searched the internet for hours and finally found a manual for my relay board, which of course came without any description.
I have to supply the relay board with external power and now everything works fine.
Oh, and by the way I finally found out what to do to prevent the relays from switching on bootup.
The relays have normally open and normally closed connectors. So when I connected everything to the closed side and booted the arduino they opened. Or the other way. That would mean that I'd have to be super careful about switching on the 230VAC, otherwise I'd have everything going wild.
But thanks to the manual I know now, that I have to put all the digital outputs I use to HIGH in the setup() loop and initialize them after that. I than just needed to inverse the HIGH and LOW command in the arduino sketch, so that 1on switches on and not off...
Everything clear? :)
Well, I think if theres somebody having the same issues like me, he'll find help here and for the others, at least a little picture, where you can clearly see the motor spinning... ;)

Have a nice easter break and a lot of success in finding the eggs, cya soon!