A little electronics project, anyone help?

Diddums x

Diddums x

Diddums x

Caporegime
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24 Oct 2012
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Yer nan's knickers
We have a water feature at work. It has 18 pumps which *should* modulate up and down to make the water feature all singing and dancing. These controls are old, redundant and no longer serviceable. The inverters for each pump run off a 1-10v signal (from 0-100%) and a regular 240v supply. What I'd like to do is use something to create a control system to regulat ethe pumps, but don't really know where to start. Would a Raspberry Pi perhaps help with this?

It's a fairly ambitious project but something I could sink my teeth in to and hopefully learn a thing or two in the process.

This is the water feature, in case anyone's wondering :)


Any ideas?
 
Arduino could be a good shout, thanks.

I'm busy looking at how to get a 0-10v signal from an Arduino which looks possible with a bit of tinkering.

How configurable would this be? If I wanted to create a custom design for the water feature, could an Arduino do that or is that more Pi territory?


Cheers :)
 
GeForce said:
The 1-10V is just a signal, so very little current is drawn from this line, correct?

If so, grab an Arduino, which runs on 5V. You will need a 10V supply for a transistor, low pass RC filter the output. Attach the transistor gate attached to an Arduino PWM output, and you can linearly control the output voltage between 0-10V.

Do you want to control each of the 18 pumps individually? Or could you connect groups of 3 pumps (so you'd need 6 analogue channels)? This will determine the number of PWM channels you need (the Arduino Uno has 6 PWM channels, the Mega has 15). If you really do want 18 individual channels there will be a little extra hardware required.

This is very doable, go for it!
Click to expand...

Excellent response, thank you :)


I'm going to start putting in some proper time to developing something like this. I reckon it'd be fun. There are 18 pumps in total, but I'll do them in groups, probably 3 or 6 in a group.

Work's just flung a load of stuff at me so I'm busy for the rest of the day but hopefully tomorrow I can get stuck in. Helps that I can order from RS too.

I'll probably return with loads of noob questions, so I apologise in advance :D
 
Right, I've proposed this to my manager and he seems interested which is good!

RS has loads of Arduino kits, what would I bet looking at? Would an UNO be able to do this?

Cheers :)
 
Nah, just patterns. I have no idea what the limitations of these boards are or how much memory they have but it'd be nice to have two or three different ones to choose from. I'm assuming changing the patterns will simply be a case of changing some code?
 
That's fantastic, thanks for the help! I'll order an Arduino on Monday. I'll grab a power supply as well, what else would I need to start off with? Assuming all I have is a laptop.
 
Right, time to knock up an RS order :D

Shopping list:

Arduino Uno R3


Aaaand that's it. Do all Arduinos use the same power supply? This site gives a good example but does this cover all of them?

Can anyone recommend a power supply?

Apologies for the noob questions, this is all VERY new to me.
 
Cool, thanks. Can you think of anything else I need to order apart from the PSU and board itself? How would I handle connectivity?

Thanks for all the help, it's greatly appreciated :)
 
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