I’ve had the Solenoid project working for about a week and a half now, but the rain and lack of sunlight was getting in the way of making a video of everything in action. It worked out well because it gave me the chance to demonstrate the project to a number of visitors today, all at once. And, as the photo above demonstrates, the project passes the kid test.
The project is still in need of refinement, but I’m thinking that’s where things would get expensive. I’ve sourced out some new solenoids that could be used in a multimedia environment, I’m just unsure of the cost. The solenoids I have used are $7 washing machine parts. Specialty valves are bound to be more expensive. Some of the valves leak, and I’m pretty sure it’s not occurring in the sections I’ve sealed, the valves may be defective, or they may have a scratch in the plastic I created when I was reconfiguring the orientation of the connectors.
The brace you can see in the photo on the left was constructed to correctly position the hoses in sequence. the centre photo demonstrates the digital radio, Arduino, and transistor controller. The green wires leading out of frame are wired to the Solenoids. On the right, the solenoids are hooked up to the hoses. (All the photos have notes visible in Flickr)
In the above video, I’ve got the device filled with water, and directed through flexible hoses. Valves 2, 4, 6, 7, and 1 turn on. They then cycle off, leaving valve 1 open. The camera then pans up to the controller where it zooms in on the LEDs which I’m using as indicators of which valves are turned on. We then go through a test of all the valves on and off to demonstrate the flow when everything is open. A couple of the valves don’t work, and I’ve traced that back to a point on the controller circuit that I think has not been soldered correctly.
I think it would be important to note the projects out there that are doing the same thing. The Jeep waterfall was unveiled at a Detroit autoshow in 2000. This waterfall was published on the Make blog just the other day. MIT’s building made of water is scheduled to open at the 2008 Expo, they’ve hired Lumiartecnia to produce the valves. Also check out this water keyboard for its innovative use of sensing electric resistance when you touch the water to control the solenoids — in this case controlling air flow in a liquid. All these examples show that the envelope can be pushed that much further, and that there’s a large degree of possible variatons.
Still lots more ideas to play with, but many of these will be with the code. I’ve got some really interesting image processing ideas coming up.
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