I havent posted much in awhile. Been busy with mycology but i wanted to step in and show you what im proud of making.
Its a smart PID controller for pasturizing manure based substrate for mushroom cultivation.
It controlls two 40 amp relays and senses 4 temperature zones(boiler temp, bin temp, inside bag temp, and outside bag temp). It has 10 gauge wire, so i can run some beefy heating element thru it.
It logs and auto uploads all data to my phone, so i can be anywhere and see the progress.
My GUI needs some major improvement but im too busy to make it pretty.
Its fully functional and was assembled with off the shelf sensors and parts. I did 100% of the code in house (chatgpt was of no help).
Its been calibrated and is accurate to 0.5F.
U press the first button and it idles the boiler at boiling (220f).
Once u connect ur bin, u press the second button and will start controlling the steam, so that the outside or inside of the bag never reaches above 170f.
It will slowly raise the temp until the inside of the bag hits 160f, starts a 3 hours counter and keeps it steady at 160f for 3 hours. Once its done, it turns off the heating elements, closes the solenoid valve and sends a summary report to my phone. I can then tell it to idle at boiling again for another run or tell it to fully shut down.
Nice work! I love seeing this kind of ingenuity. Python and pi based im guessing? If you ever want direction on ui or all in one board design shoot me a dm. Would be cool to see this data mapped in grafana.
Yes, pretty much all python based.
still very amateur i know lol…
I havent sat down and done real world coding in quite sometime. So alot of it was refreshing my memory on how to properly setup the loops.
I will hit u up soon, im looking at getting my own custom pcb boards, the only part i havent quite figured out is how to get beefy solid state relays on to a board without frying it from overuse.
My current prototype #2, is seperating the logic board from the relay board, so that the logic board can all be one pcb. Then just have a connection to the other box that is just full of relays.
Im also playing around with plastic injection and silicone molding, so i can have a modern sleek look to the control boxes and not make it look so Frankenstein
Looking good man! Have you thought about 3d printing for your control box? I know it’s not very production friendly but it you only need one or two boxes it should be good
Yes i have. Im making these for in house then once i get some decent funds, ill look into making them into more of a finished product look.
The container i used was left over from another project, but i got some carbon fiber petg to print the prototype enclosures.
Once i get that figured out, ill use the 3d printer to create molds for the plastic injection. 3d printer takes about 30 hours to complete an enclosure, with plastic injection i can get that down to 30 sec per enclosure.
I need to get it all onto one pcb board before i play with making a custom enclosure for it, or else ill just be repeating steps 1-3 over and over
I have had tons of issues with Slamazon relays that I’m not sure I’d trust baking it into a board. If it were me, I’d still keep the beefy relays separate so that if you were to have an issue with one, you can swap it out without soldering. All you’d need to do is run a signal wire from your custom board to your relay.
Thanks for the tip, i was thinking the same thing. Thats why i always double the amp on my ssr, im only running 15amps thru a 40amp relay and its still gets hotter than id like.
My solution was to poke the radiators out the back and ill have the heat dissipating with a fan.
It would be nice to have all the relays in a grounded metal box, so if anything does go wrong, im not starting a fire
I love the project dude! I fuck with the RPi and I totally fuck with python. I wrote code that is used by a company in my state to catch pedophiles using Python in ~30k lines. It’s a super powerful language and I totally dig your use case! Can’t wait to see it progress, brotha!
