 | The current project under construction is a remote sensor network connected to a Raspberry Pi that can use a Tracfone to text data to you when sensors are triggered. | |
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I have been working on a tool (tensioner pliers) to set the compression of a Rotary Planar Peristaltic Micropumps (RPPMs) and Rotary Planar Valves (RPVs) that were designed by the folks at the lab where I work. It's nice when work can benefit from hobbies and vise versa. One cheap kitchen scale, some time with the Dremel Tools, and a bit of epoxy and a cheap pair of crucible tongs has produced a prototype that I think is worth showing to the lab group to suggest further development toward production of couple dozen units. These things will get distributed to the other research labs that are using the rotary planar devices that we produce, a few at a time, in our lab. We hope that these pumps will go into mass production soon which could help Lab-on-a-Chip technologies to be more affordable to labs around the world. In the present form, you have to manually tension the pumps and valves to make sure that they perform with some consistency which is where the tensioner pliers come in. In the future, the tension will be “programmed” into each pump insert, rendering my pliers obsolete. Maybe somebody can find another use for the pliers someday. |  | |
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I recently Purchased a few Cheap Chinese WiFi devices based on the ESP8266. I plan to use these to extend my sensor network and test the capabilities of having an “Internet of Things” aka IoT. The current sensor network is based on XBee radios that are communicating with a Raspberry Pi. The WiFi devices could turn out to be about 10 times cheaper than the XBee radios that I'm using, depending on the peripherals that go around them, of course, and should allow me to increase the number of sensor locations without breaking the bank. Xbees have a whole different application than these WiFI modules, but I thought it would be fun to create a mixed sensor network. |   | |