ThinkTank Home Project Tasks Milestones Tools Decisions Testing Final Design
One of the first things that we attempted with this aquarium was to switch out our high-power consuming, large pumps and valves, to a smaller variety. Switching out our valves was actually our first prototype which failed as we could not get the valves to actuate, and then the water pressure built up in the tubing until it exploded spraying water all over our power supply. Shortly after this failure, we got our pumps and valves working as expected, and they are currently raising and lowering the water level or our final project.
We had to test the MOSFETs and get them working properly so we would have the control we needed over the water level. When we discovered that the gate-source difference of our MOSFETs was too high we used diode transistor logic to get everything working back as expected, and now they work perfectly in cohesion with our pumps and valves.
All of the original code was written for an Arduino to control everything like our LEDs, water level, and water temperature, so we had to rewrite everything to be able to work with the ESP32 Cam. This required testing each part individually with the microcontroller and the new code until we were sure that everything worked and there were no bugs.
Once all of the code was working for each part individually, we attatched all of the parts to our newly designed PCB to make sure that both the PCB and everything was working together. Thankfully, the PCB worked on the first try, so we didn't have to do anything more with that.
Date when last updated: 5/7/2020
Photo Courtesy of wallup.net