Water Filtration Construction Phase 9

Table of contents for Water Filtration

We are back to the build process for the water filtration unit this week. Today, we are going to wire up the 24V rail to operate the sprinkler valve. We were under the delusion that the transformer we have only put out 12V but we were drastically wrong. Before we figured this out; however, we attempted to put together our own little toroidal transformer. Not working so well. Check out this little video clip to see us explain what didn’t work, what did work, and a small test of the solenoid mechanism.

transformer

This is an image of our attempt at an unnecessary transformer.

Next up, after that bit was figured out, was to put together the circuit we discussed last week. For refresher we have attached a link to the schematics we gave you from last time. We used some protoboard to knock together a quick circuit to run the show and put the whole thing in a nice metal project box for later mounting inside the filter box. We didn’t want to put the Arduino and other control circuitry inside the big box to avoid any electrical interference. Below are some pictures of us soldering the components to the control circuitry.

This is the end result of the control board. It is currently attached to the Arduino.

Below are some more pictures on the precess of soldering the board:

Here’s a quick Bill of Materials for the electronics:

Two 560 Ohm 1/4 Watt resistors
Two 1k Ohm 1/4 Watt resistors
One 2A 600V Bridge Rectifier (Mouser P/N 621-2W06G)
One TIP120 Bipolar Power transistor (Mouser P/N 512-TIP120)
One 24V Postive Voltage Regulator
Two green LED
Wire
Protoboard
Arduino
Project case to hold everything

This list isn’t exhaustive–we didn’t include all the terminals and connectors for the various wiring–and a lot will depend on your systems wiring needs. The schematics should be your guide in how too hook things up and not our pictures. Try to keep things modular and tidy so that you don’t spend a lot of your time cleaning up things you did a day or a week ago.

The electronics we did this week ended up being two seperate little boards so that we could keep our power supply electronics away from our control electronics as mentioned above.There was a bit of a bodge involved as our transformer didn’t have any available conectors left so we stripped a section of wire and attached to that for our 24V rail.

We also added a couple of feet to the bottom of our box to make it slightly less noise–it was pretty quite already–and to keep it from scratching up the floor. Check out the video for that below.

P&S