Brunswick Bio Flo controller

Little Ghostman said:

These are slotted screws, i am going to grind the heads off with a dremel. Time to stop playing nicely. 4 coils 8 wires...... Makes sense, these motors are not a special part, apparently they are used in alot of other things. No idea what or i would have the datasheet , but i do know how super critical stiring can be on these reactors, you need to be able to turn them smoothly from virtually zero all the way up to spin speed on a washer! (ok not that fast). Also some reverse, i dont know if reverse was on the controller for this one.

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The stirrers might use "microstepping" just for smoothness. Micro-stepping defines discrete current levels for each coil, so they can position "between" discrete positions.

I will be updating this next week with pics, most of next week if it goes to plan, is to get as much of this running as I can. Main problem is the variac, I cant afford one for 5 weeks as mothers day has taken up all the cash flow. It comes at the wrong time!! Jan and feb are slow months mainly, but most the soap we do takes ~7-8 weeks to mature. So Christmas time is when we make Mothers day soap, most the outlets we sell into order them for the two weeks before mothers day.

So we then have to wait 28 days to get paid which stretches to 5 weeks roughly for most. Also i need to switch the electric bill date, it all falls the same weeks which makes it hard!! But coming upto our first year i can see loads of things we can change to make cash flow better. So sick of making bath sets the last few weeks!! Got some male products coming out soon, and a male lifestyle type online magazine.

We havnt used the net much yet for selling, but the site and shop almost complete ready to go live. Our local printer has gone bust a few weeks ago, he did all our label printing. Great price and really good quality, he also did small runs (100) for all digital printing the quality was excellent. But looks like another local business hasnt paid his bill and the guy is having to shut down..... Real shame.

I will make do without a variac for now, its a couple of months of breathing in at the moment lol. The new soap kitchen cost a fortune, i got alot of the stainless steel benches from a restaurant that was having its kitchens redone, Still eye watering what they cost though, the biggest shock was tiles!! 11,000 white tiles as we ended up going for a smaller tile (long story). Its taken alot longer to get going than i thought, we have had good levels of custom from the start but its the things you dont think of that take time.

Just setting up the actual business took ages.

Ok i have had to put this on hold.. Gone back to batch system for now. Too many problems to sort out quickly enough, Everything in this system is a night mare so i am going to use a sil labs dev board with touch screen. I will post it up still but first i need to work out how to swap alot of the system over to a single comms system. its really messy at the moment, It looks like i have to pick RS 485 which is something i havnt used before.

The main issue is, several of the integrated units like some of the controllers for PH are RS485, which is a mare as they dont seem to have separate power sources, everything is via the D connectors. Not to bad but might give me problems when it hits the main controller that is 3.3V max....

I ran out of time trying to sort the stupid 110V systems on it, and finding a REDOX probe cheap enough i could afford it!! then building some of the controllers. But its now time to get ready for summer shows etc so i need product now!! I will be back on this though, and expect to see aspects of this pop up now and then. Really gutted i never got fully going on this one , but once work slows a bit i will be back to it. I know its the kind of project people here love, its alot of build from scratch stuff and some IOT stuff thrown in as well.

Little Ghostman said:

... but once work slows a bit i will be back to it. I know its the kind of project people here love, its alot of build from scratch stuff and some IOT stuff thrown in as well.

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That's for sure, LG.

Looking forward to it ...