Saturday, November 10, 2012

Liquid Soap Dispenser? : A Ported Entry

First Friday.
Another project.
Here's an actual photo! Google isn't letting me insert a jpeg outside of my G-drive.. so.. "img src ="br />
chemical damage to a circuit
It's a photo that was uploaded to my twitter (or technically to bucketphoto) back in August. I never really went around to doing something with it. It's just been sitting on my table top all this time. It's the micro controller to a liquid soap dispenser (LSD). LSD's are cheap now-a-days. Cheap as in, 10-15 USD depending on the brand/model. The lame thing about this LSD was that we had it in the house for not more than a few months before this chemical attack to the interior happened. The batteries consequently leaked out, but this might have been due to a different cause? After having it sit in the kitchen idle for so long, the soap within the pipes and components dried out and cogged the system. I needed to disassemble it to clean out the soap and used a needle to clear out the nozzle piece. Actually it turned out I only needed to remove a membrane covering it and rush water in. Weird enough, after I scrapped off the "rust" and made a connection with some new batteries, the motor works.. or at least it wiggles, but it does so based on a preset value it's stuck on. Neither of the switches seem to adjust this. The LSD can manage to pump water out through the nozzle, but the pump pressure isn't high enough to yield us some actual liquid soap. I guess if we diluted the thing some.. Nay! I will not be forced to live life with diluted soap! I need a replacement augmented microcontroller. I can probably still use some of the components already on the chip. I think it's just the plastic on the board that's ruined. But the exposed copper is also rusted..
So I have a theory:
on top by the output nozzle there is an IR emitter. By the base on top of the two buttons of the LSD there's an IR sensor. When a person puts a hand to request for soap the LSD reads this by some discontinuity in its reading. Or maybe this is in reverse?
Found this video. Turns out my product comes from a company calling itself "Simplehuman," they make kitchen appliances. My model is the ST1008, the circuit was created back, at most in, 2010 though. I think I'll keep the peripherals, do away with their main circuit, and replace it with something holding an Atmel AVR microcontroller.

2nd theory: Recalling form memory, the bottom LED, or LED#1 serves as an indicator. LED#2 is definitely IR though. But there's a 2nd element on the auxiliary PCB of a type I don't recognize. serial # 503504-00-01. Also, I'm not sure what the 2nd IC on the main PCB is for. It's probably a H-bridge of some type. The main PCB also has a 4 hole-ed portion labeled "J2". I'm thinking ST1008 uses a generic PCB design. It looks that this model doesn't use that portion maybe, and therefore some of the resistors embedded don't really do anything? Or another theory, maybe J2 is a spot designated for a programmer to come in to prepare the main IC? It probably still works. I don't think anything on the PCB has been shorted, only disconnected due to the chemical attack that diffused through it. LED#1 is no longer turning on though. A multimeter does read a potential difference across it. I might be able to just replicating the whole PCB board again, but I really wanted to develop something from scratch. That auxiliary PCB is still an issue. Portion "J3" - I'll need to prototype with a breadboard and see what values come out as I run current through the leads. Or maybe I'll just use an Arudino for this since it's what I'm already more familiar with.

Textual Update: A Ported Entry


Photos, I believe people love to see photos..
Some updates concerning proposed blog entries/project topics.

Team isn't doing the car buying analysis. We're pretending to finance a fake toy operation now. We just grabbed/sky-blued numbers for raw materials needed from around the interweb and we plan to do a series of present worth analysis-s on it based on assumed minimum acceptable rate of return (MARR) values. Our progress report isn't due for another week or two (need to double check on this). Basically, we're mass producing a differential-drive toy robots on two assumptions (labor intensive and with capital investments on some hardware). Again, it's a fake on-paper analysis made with many assumptions. Professor basically told us to sky blue any numbers we have a hard time getting access to and to focus more on the analysis/spreadsheet comparisons. Let it be so.

The ratchet group project for my ME440 class is done and over with. I'm not particularly proud of it, and am somewhat reluctant to even speak of it more. I think our group got the highest score on it, but this was more or less based on our presentation (write-up/ and group presentation) of it as opposed to its real world functionality. I brought a carrot in during presentation day (this is irreverent information). A week ago (or two?) we made a 1:2 scale model with a rapid prototype with ABS plastic. It had.. issues. Which were addressed, but like stated, I'm not particularly proud of it.We did however, make springs. Almost "hand-made" with the assistance of a power drill. These weren't heat tempered or anything, we just rolled up guitar strings around a metal (bronze) stick with a hole in it. Working on the prototype in the Mendenhall/Machine Shop in TBE was pretty neat. I rarely go in there these days, and this gave me an excuse to look through the hardware and play around with the drill press some. A flesh wound on my right pointer finger now gives memories of this recent experience.

We do have a nice, privileged machine shop for the "elite" to use. But undergrads aren't allowed in there. Personally, I was told it's usually us who break stuff. I think in the past I've been guilty of having destroyed one or two drill bits, but nothing beyond that. It would be nice to access some of this hardware.. and not pay for it, but I guess those operations have to be financed somehow.

Oh, and I'm now suppose to do a 10 minute presentation for my microbiology class sometime within the upcoming month. It was originally going to focus on pig whip worms and their relation to autoimmune diseases, but I officially changed this "proposal" to the topic of genechip technology. It was mentioned during today's* lecture, and I just so happen to have one sitting on my desktop for no apparent reason. I believe it was Shelby's gift to me after attending that SWE conference back in '09 or '10?  I've had it since and never really did any research on it. I guess I'll be killing birds with stones.

So really, I've nothing but some short storys to share. I'll update on the aforementioned projects with photos in the near future. My camera/phone is sort of not reliable at the moment. I can take photos, but in a very blind manner. I'm still under my parent's contract, but  I can't say I'm a fan of Sprint's phone services or phone updates. I've definitely been looking into that new Nexus 4 that's about to come out, but I'm not sure if our plan will cover it. In fact, I'm almost doubtful. Sprint likes to keep control of what our phones do, they likely enjoy restricting the updates provided for us. Oh, and they keep spamming us with ads through their SMS system.. It is horrible, and I'm almost certain Sprint probably skins puppies for their fur and stuff. Also,  I've been considering getting a tattoo for the longest time. Right now, this comes to mind. Really digging the spiky spiral concept. It reminds me much of a zerg theme; and yes, caffeine is my favorite chemical. <3

This is starting to seem more like a personal blog than a project-blog type of thing. It guess it doesn't matter. It's just an update. I had some problems with my Ubuntu OS a few days ago. For some reason my memory was starting to get used like crazy. Haven't been able to troubleshoot it. It got so bad that start up wouldn't let me log in without calling out some errors with graphic settings (lack of memory) not being configured right. It's an issue with the 30 Gb installation (easy enough). Luckily, most of my important data is saved on a different partition than the root install, so I simply uninstalled the OS and I'm currently in the process of a fresh install v12.1 (brute force solution). Oh, and my laptop doesn't have a CD tray. Also not relevant in a way, but I haven't been able to do a "full" installation since I never bothered to redo this with a big enough flash drive. I assume this process could lead to a partition greater than the standard 30 Gb, or there's probably a way to increase the size after allocating of the space? This could use some more looking into.