Thanks Jeff. That makes sense. So I guess I will leave it as is. I do try to keep HA as healthy as possible because we use it for so much. But that’s not always an easy task.
It must be nice to be able to just write your own code when stuff doesn’t exist lol. I’m stuck googling and trying my best to understand what I am reading. Once I get it figured out then I can usually understand what its doing and why. Its just not always apparent to me in the beginning.
Having a small issue with the CT clamp right now that I cant seem to pinpoint. I’m wondering if I used the wrong burden resistor. I swear I’ve read so much about how to hook that up over the last few days I’ve gone numb. Some places say that CT clamp has one built in and other say it doesn’t. I went with it doesn’t and got it calibrated this morning to real close to my fluke amp clamp. But every once in a while it will spike up the current and If I catch it then I throw the fluke on there and the current isn’t there. Fluke showing .03A and ESP showing .15A
It very well could be that I ordered the wrong CT clamp. This thing is for up to 100 amps. So as small as I’m trying to read may just be out of its range. I’m going to run it here in a little while and see what the max current is during a cut and order a smaller one that’s closer in range for what I’m using. Ill find somewhere else to use this 100 amp one.
I use these in the control box. Then I buy a premade 2-prong power cable. If someone trips on the cable, it either unplugs from the wall or unplugs from the enclosure. No different than any other electronic item in the house.
Perhaps a little late now you are well and truly down the rabbit hole but doesn’t your VFD have an internal relay that you can configure for driving accessories like a filtration system?
It wouldn’t surprise me if it did, and I never once thought of that. Might be able to use that as an input to the D1 so it can wirelessly tell the dust collection to turn on. Something to think about for sure. Thanks!
Your design is really nice. I was trying to do something very similar when I was designing mine, but instead of going through HA, I had a Pi Zero mounted next to the dust collector with it’s own MQTT server running. All the esp32 devices monitoring the machines would send an update to MQTT that the server would pick up and turn the dust collector on.
I stopped working on it, because everything I use is within a few steps of the dust collector. And, honestly, once it’s running, the dust collector is more like a background white noise. Kinda a soothing low hum in the corner of the shop.
So I just leave it on and go from machine to machine opening/closing blast gates as I work.
That’s awesome! This was more of a “see if I can actually make it work” than a “I really need this” situation lol. And with my dust collection in a separate room its not quite as easy. Since new I have had it on a remote on/off switch that I got from Amazon with a wireless remote. And for the most part that has worked great. Every once in a while Ill forget where I left the remote and it can be a pain but 99% its great.
This was actually the start of a much larger plan. And the first step to see if it was even possible. Now the next step is to print out some new ball valve style blast gates I found and then set them up with servo motors. Add more CT clamps to the other main dust collection machines (2nd LR3, Table Saw, Chop Saw and Spindle Sander) and automate the entire system. I want to walk up to the table saw, turn it on and have the dust collection open the blast gate and turn on all by its self. And when I turn off the saw have it run for ~30 seconds longer to clear the piping and then shut off and close the blast gate. That’s my end goal anyways lol. I need to get one of these gates printed up and start looking at mounting the servo and all that. See what its all going to actually take to get working.
His are for Schedule 40 PVC I believe. I scaled them so that the DWV fits on the inside, and no path in the line ever gets smaller than the ID of the PVC pipe.
It annoys me when I see all of these dust collection designs that don’t maintain the correct I.D. of the main pipe and add restriction
Edit: Also, the Servos he suggests are like $35 a piece, but I found these that seem to work good enough. I don’t have it fully running yet, so I don’t know how it performs under suction, but it feels plenty strong for me at 1/3 of the price
Lol that’s what I figured. I will order some of the larger ones. I cant even remember what I got these for. But I’m sure some day ill come up with something to use them for LOL
I started writing the code for it based on some things I pieced together online, but I decided that I’m not using current sensors to automate it. I’m just going to put a toggle switch at each station to manually turn it when I need. I just could see myself needing to use the suction at my miter saw station for something else temporarily and not being able to because the saw wasn’t running, so I figured I would just simplify it.
The LR3 is the only one I intend to automate turning it on when the job is running.
I haven’t tried actually running the code I’ve written yet though
