Dan,
Very cool design. I assumed with the arduino it would be a simple matter of more i/o and you could do whatever you wanted. I have been kicking around a blast gate design and just had no real idea on how to control it¡. I know one thing, I¡¯m tired of running about opening and closing gates and having to hit the DC button every time I turn something on.
I just built a rotary indexer for my laser engraver and while the mechanicals were a walk in the park, the electrical was a slight challenge, good thing I have a friend that¡¯s up on steppers motors and such, made it a lot easier¡ and it actually worked!
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Thanks Brian. ?No current intent or plans to sell these, but never say never.
With this approach, scaling to multiple ports and machines would be easy. ?While mine is set up for one input channel (saw) and 1 output channel (blast gate), one could have multiple clip-on current sensors detecting "on/off" for any number of machines (but each would need a wire coming into the controller. ?Other than the sensor, no additional electronic components needed on the input side. ?On the output side, control to multiple blast gates would be just as easy - again, each gate with it's own wire to the unit. Would need one additional relay per blast gate, but these are only about $2 each.
You'd just need to get somewhat familiar with the Arduino software code to configure it to behave the way you want (i.e. 2 blast gates on one machine, but only 1 on another, etc). ?But once you nailed this, making changes would be simple.
Dan
