Hi everyone, Ive been looking at the Arduino for a little while and since my last control board has broken, I am now wondering if this Arduino is capable of recreating my control board.
My old board uses a sensor to monitor the level of a hopper, a timer to switch on a vacuum motor, a counter to count 3 loads when the sensor has not been filled (the vacuum is not loading material) to activate an alarm.
Could anyone please let me know if the Arduino is capable of this ?
There is a proxy sensor to detect the presence of material and the alarm can be anything as long as it is loud !
I dont mind changing the alarm from 24v AC to whatever if the Arduino board can copy the current control board.
Would it be advisable to use relay for the alarm also ?
Any of the sensors can be replaced to suit the controller if necessary.
It is much more important that the current control board is replicated
If you have existing sensors, alarms, and switches that are working I wouldn't change out any of that.
Doesn't matter if it is a 24v AC alarm. Arduino can write out to an appropriately selected relay and trigger that. Same with the current sensor- if it delivers 12v or something I would use circuitry to scale the input down (call it part of the "control board") rather than change anything out for new.
You have nice discrete steps. Sensor to monitor hopper level. Okay. What does that do? Send an xx volt signal? Decrease resistance? Figure that out first. Say it sent a 12v signal. First step is making that a 5v signal a microcontroller can read. Then work from there. I agree with Crossroads- it seems "straigtforward enough."