For Dutch Design Week 2018, I am doing a kinda secret project. Not completely ready for it, just started two weeks before the whole thing starts. Happily, it has two weekends so maybe, very maybe I will be showing my new secret stuff there. If things go south, I can also pretend I am making it for #DDW2024 😉
So what is the project actually about? Something with beer, a magnitude of 42 watts of cooling power, a peltier element and lots of PC processor coolers. What else? Keep tuned and maybe all the bits and pieces fall together into one big story.
The first name for the project was BeerButler. But, there is a website which is already called BeerButler. Last week I got a note in the mailbox. My friendly neighbor found an awesome name for my latest project:
Thanks to all the sponsors who are giving or lending me all the nice goodies.
At Vanderlande, the place where I am now working as a contractor I got some nice goodies. The stuff is mainly Sick components. Stuff to measure reflectance. Mainly intended to measure if the thing I want to do is positioned at the sweet spot location. Also I got lots of threaded end.
For the project, I needed something to lift something. So I thought, let’s make a linear actuator. Initially I thought about lots of pieces of threaded end. But, I was also thinking of something more robust. In the past I had seen there was a linear actuator (from Openbuilds). So I contacted Nico, who is working at Systems Development at NTS-Group.
They were very nice to lend me a linear stage for the duration of a month. It is the C-beam linear actuator bundle which has been fitted with a Trinamic PD57-2-1161. Awesome stuff! I had it moving within 10 minutes. Attach 12 Volt, download the TMCL-IDE and start moving.
In the beginning I was not that impressed with the max speed (max. 2047 integer value), but after changing the micro-stepping it started moving very fast. Acceleration needed to be tuned down, the bottle was not keeping up with the almost instant movement. The movie shows a quite smooth movement of the bottle 😀