Designing and Building of an Electrovalves Control System
by JonSesBel in Circuits > Electronics
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Designing and Building of an Electrovalves Control System
The idea of this project comes from de Water Clock in Osaka Station (Japan). This "fountain" is able to display numbers, letters and and any kind o shape just by opening and closing water valves as shown in the image.
So the objective of this project is to replicate in a smaller scale this water clock at a cheaper price. Also, there will be added extra functionalities, for example, being able to control it with a smartphone.
All resources of this project will be uploaded to my GitHub.
Supplies
Parts
- 3D Printed Water Tank
- 12-24V Solenoid valves
- ESP32
- Custom PCBs
- Silicon Tubes
- LED Strip
Tools
- Soldering Iron
- 3D Printer
- Laser cut
Software
- Arduino IDE
- Autodesk Fusion 360
Understanding of the Project
A big tank at the top stores the water that will be use for the droplets. It is connected to and array of valves through silicon tubes. This valves will drop the water to another tank at the bottom. This array is controlled with a couple of custom PCBs that receive the information from an ESP32. This microcontroller can be connected to an smartphone son the system can be controlled remotely.
The Solenoid Valves
After doing some experimentation. I determine the which model of solenoid valve was the best suited for this application.
Custom PCB
In order to control an array of valves, a custom PCB was needed.
Programming the Microcontroler
The microcontroller used is an ESP32. With this microcontroller we can create a server so any smartphone can connect to it and sent the information remotely.
Creating the Server
All the resources of this project are in the github linked at the Introduction of this project.
Demos
Here are some video demonstrations of the droplets display working.