Hi. I’m just throwing this out there to see if anyone has done something like this or has any ideas.
I’m wanting to provide electric latching for the drawers in our kitchen. Imagine fairly wide kitchen drawers with no handles. There are the usual ‘push to open’ gadgets which are meant to spring the drawers open with a gentle push. These are useless. Expensive for what they are, fail after a couple of years, and forever require aligning to get the drawer fronts even. We’ve tried push to open latches of several different styles and makers and none are any good - so now I’m thinking of making my own. Naturally I want to check out electronic solutions.
I’m imaging something like each drawer having a latching mechanism hooked up to a single nano, or maybe several. A rubber buffer would provide the necessary spring outwards when the latch is sprung electronically, and provide a soft close when the drawer is closed. Closing the drawer would reset the latch. How you would trigger the Nano to open the drawer I don’t know.
Further information. We have a lot of drawers - about 30 in the upstairs kitchen and pantry, and 12 in the downstairs kitchen. Therefore I don’t want to replace the whole drawer with ones that have a built in system for cost reasons. We have so many drawers because we don’t have cupboards as my wife and I have noticed we’re not getting any younger and don’t want to have to bend over and root around in the back of a cupboard to retrieve a frying pan. Secondly, putting handles on the drawer fronts would solve the problem, but apparently that isn’t an option (ever).
I did a Google search and found lots of electronic latches,but none that was ideal. Still, I may use them, but I still need to provide the electronic control.
The other complicating factor is that the human interface must be very unobtrusive. The whole house is designed to take minimalism to the extreme (not real happy about that either) so we would rather not have any obtrusive buttons etc.
So maybe I haven’t given enough detail but I’m not wanting to stifle creative solutions. It’s really just a job of latching/unlatching some drawers electronically with a few complications thrown in.
If your rubber buffer is soft and thick enough, a push on the front could activate a button switch, which would release the latch.
That system would probably need to know whether a drawer was open or closed, so it doesn't unlatch when it is closing. Or, ensure the drawers close softly enough to not activate the switches.
If I was to make a mechanical solution I doubt I could do any better then what is out there to purchase.,maybe if I had a 3d printer or milling machine it might be different.
Each latch, and hence each drawer, would need two cables, and they would be at the back of the cabinet, unseen. The cabinets have either 4 or 5 drawers so I anticipated having some sort of control unit at the top of each cabinet with one pair of wires dropping down to each drawer, so 4 or 5 wires each. Getting power and control to the control unit within the cabinet is my bigger problem
I don’t think the issue of the drawers activating the switch when being closed would really be a problem in practice. Most of the drawers are very finely balanced and require very little effort to close so you’d soon learn to close the drawers softly but use a harder push when opening and thus compressing the foam rubber more. That’s pretty much what happens with the existing mechanical closures anyway, you have to think as you close them and it does take a bit of learning.
Unfortunately the downstairs drawers are made from much cheaper ‘drawer kits’ and aren’t so refined. They slam when you close them. I will need a solution for them, maybe based on timing. User closes the drawer too hard and springs the latch, latch closes and switch is ignored for 3 seconds while user closes more gently. I could live with that.