Private and Charter schools partially exist because they don’t have to follow the rules of public schools.
All those rules for spending public money are because someone bought some ridiculously priced paper clips or something from their cousin. This is why we can’t have nice things.
A curriculum with the LR4 would be incredible. I don’t think the bar is that high either. Most teachers are capable and willing to fill in the gaps. You’ll get more excitement and recommendations from more flushed out stuff. But I have seen some lesson plans that were pretty light.
the ball valves I use are a modified version of this
with a 20KG servo attached.
Similar to this, but I think his model is for schedule 40 PVC and I’m using 4" DWV.
There are a few other servo-controlled blast gate models out there as well.
I just don’t like that people tend to model their stuff to fit inside the pipe instead of outside, so made my own system of attachments and stuff to make sure I never reduce the pipe along the path.
At the moment, the system I’m building doesn’t care what you use. All it cares it that it is a servo-controlled blast gate. You give it the control GPIO and the parameters it needs (open position, clode position, travel limits) and it will do what it needs to do.
It could be easily extended to include other actuated blast gates types as well.
My original intent was just to have a single controller and wire everything back… but it sat in my head long enough for me to sufficiently over complicate it
In general, I would say the type of Dust collector you have is going to drive everything.
Whether it is a real impeller-based dust collector vs a shop-vac style that creates stsatic pressure is going to change performance and drive a lot of those decisions.
From there you have to know CFMs etc. A Harbor freight dust collector can support a 4" pipe. Larger systems can work on 6" pipes with no problem.
How many tools you have, how many you run simultaneously, size of pipe, type of pipe, type of collector… all of those change the effiectiveness of the system and how it needs to be designed.
So… it depends on what you mean by optimal. Optimal for what?
For most people, their limits are going to be budget and power requirements.
I started writing code for a similar system years ago, using Arduinos and XBee links. Implementation never happened and in the interim, I’ve changed the approach to ESP32 using MQTT over WiFi.
At the moment, I’m just using ESP32 dev boards.
