segunda-feira, junho 30, 2014

Poor's Man Mill


Usually the people that do your beer, or homebrewers, use the manual mill to grind the malt.
Some others use the a drilling machine attached to the mill axis. Works fine but over time eventually damage your drilling machine.


I found a old motor, saved from a old washing machine with 1/2 Hp and running in 127Vac.


This is a standard grain mill, with the handle removed, and attached a pulley with 150mm diameter.





With an old wooden stand for CPU, I decided to adapt and fix the mill, including a new wooden support.

For this I cut and pasted a new piece of wood, trying to leave with a nice appearance.







The quality was not very good in appearance, but is very functional and fixed.



The next step was buy a "VA" belt in necessary length and mount the motor using a metal plate to fix the motor in the wood.








The relation between pulleys wasn't calculated, but I imagine around 120 rpm in the mill axis.


First test:

The belt is loose, if a crash occurs, it simply escapes, preventing motor burn.

domingo, junho 01, 2014

Saving Parts - IR Stage

My neighbor threw away an old TV, I took the opportunity to save some pieces.
Among them, I found the Infra Red receiver module (remote control).


The module consists of a infrared receiver and a circuit based on IC TDA3047.


The interface consists of 3 signals, VCC, GND and Data.
When powering the module with 5 VDC, we can read the pulses on Data pin with the Arduino.


With IRremote library available on the Arduino, you can capture the pulse values ​​(RAW) or in hexadecimal.
http://www.righto.com/2009/08/multi-protocol-infrared-remote-library.html


It is also possible to capture the pulses, and plot it, using Octave or GNUPlot software.
For this, I used the code available here:
http://playground.arduino.cc/Code/InfraredReceivers

The output of my cd player remote control can be seen below:


From the old remote control, I took the 2 IR LEDs and 1 transistors BC556 and created the IR transmitter to the Arduino.


Arduino IR Repeater