"Fix Before Wife Comes Home" A PRACTICAL Arduino Use (for once)

[Music] again howdy my friends and welcome to the channel today i'm luke thunderhead 289 here on youtube and today we're doing something a little bit different and you all know how i have an affinity for driving these old cars and fixing old broken things well not driving this car in particular this has been my legacy project as you saw it's got a supercharger up front and you know a lot of things barely work out when you put together a car this one things barely don't so i've had to do a lot of fab work but maybe 20 22's a year like i said it's my legacy project um in the sense of something that's like takes forever to get done but all of that aside you know if you're like me where you like fixing broken things instead of buying new things because i don't know you like pain and suffering which i must or maybe it's my old trailer park roots where i didn't have any you know two nickels to rub together so i always had to fix things but anyway that's prevailed into my later life here and today of course it's my wife's side of the garage right you know so she's a veterinarian and she has to go weird hours and of course her garage door opener broke now the hardware is still good and so i really don't want to change all that out and so instead of buying a new one we're going to do something kind of weird so for my very minute amount of research this seems to be an older unit somewhere before 1993 because it doesn't have the photo eyes that was apparently a requirement at some point in history after 1993 so it must predate that and the hardware in this thing is really cool i've never actually looked at how a garage door works and so we'll take a look at that here in a second and jumper some leads and basically run it manually so we can see the mechanisms doing their thing but all i can figure is the circuit board is bunk on the thing i've tried about everything just show you here what it does [Music] yeah not good so needless to say not very effective obviously and at the moment my wife's been opening the door manually and she's like a little five foot four thing and before she hurts herself or honestly more likely she hurts me because she has to do that we better get something figured out so i've really always kind of wondered how a garage door opener works you know i've never had a reason to look into it until now and i'm kind of a mechanization nerd and this thing is really cool in the sense it's highly mechanical but there's a lot of beauty in its overall simplicity you know it's just a very low power electric motor on this worm gear helical gear here that engages another gear if you can see it in here quite a bit of debris from where over the 30 years it's been running but that goes on to this main shaft which engages this gear but the other cool thing about it is actually there's a gear here on the bottom and it runs this carriage back and forth when the garage door is opening and closing now these are your adjusters here for setting where the garage door technically stops and it's cool as this carriage goes by it will actually make connections with these different points that must feed into the controller here on the circuit board and tell it when to shut off so i think i can utilize that to effectively make a simplified version of a garage door opener now disregard all the wires in this box over here this is our home brewed garage door opener which we'll get to in a second but one other thing that's pretty cool about the original control board is off the motor shaft it actually has this hall effect sensor which basically can sense if the motor is actually spinning so what i assume the original control board did is if the door was running up and down and it didn't get to one of the limit sensors in its sense that the motor quit rotating it would assume that it came into contact with something and it would probably effectively stop the motor and send the motor back up or whatever but at least the control board would have known if the motor stopped before it was supposed to and it could cut power to it in some way shape or form so again pretty cool little electro-mechanical mechanism here simple yet pretty effective so enough talk let's just trigger this thing by hand and watch it do its thing it's pretty cool all right we're just going to jumper right from the hot side here originally it would have went through a relay based on the controller inputs and made this connection programmatically but instead we're just gonna jump right here you see everything going to town the door carriage is going down you can see this little guy moving there we go [Music] and we can switch directions by just jumping where we're touching on this capacitor this is a single phase motor so essentially it delays the phase on the windings and so you can control which direction the motor is going by determining which leg this capacitor is hooked to so i assume there's a couple of relays in there that would flip either or to put power to one side or the other of this coil or capacitor rather so pretty cool so i think if we utilize that with a couple of relays and this carriage interlock i think we can make a garage door opener pretty easily all right so we're in the little engine workshop here it's nice and heated which is a new one for me has not been very hard to get used to since you know way better than being in a storage unit freezing to death in the middle of an iowa winter so naturally everything is kind of a mess because in the middle of a lot of winter time projects because what else you going to do you can completely lose your sanity here in iowa and so anyway on this project i think the easiest thing to do is use one of those el cheapo open source microcontrollers which they do work pretty good pretty effective so i've puked out some code here with some air handling so basically if the garage door say it doesn't move it's not going to burn the motor up or catch my house on fire and burn it down probably and so anyway let's take a look here and then we'll get this all installed and uh see if i did a decent job writing the code for this thing maybe maybe not be pretty sub ideal to burn my house down so let's try and not do that now i'll be honest i could have also have done this with basically a simple relay type circuit but to have the same capability of air handling that i have in this controller i would have had timers and latching circuits and a bunch of stuff that i got pretty expensive pretty fast and just a lot of wiring and so ultimately i did choose to go to the microcontroller route which this one in particular is an arduino and they kind of have a bad name you know and i've never liked them until recent years because you know kind of like you see here this is how most people's projects end wires all over the place it just looks hideous and unsafe you know i'm willing to do this for a test scenario but ultimately when i finalize a project that i've done with arduino and bluetooth communication all that i'll just print out a simple circuit board and in this day and age 2021 or so you can have these print out super cheap and get them to you you know super fast so there's no reason not to utilize this stuff and then microcontrollers get really cool and very useful in a hurry and not so ugly like this now we still had to use some relays in here a couple of relays primarily for the 120 circuit to our motor and so the simplest way i could think to do it is to power one relay when i want the motor to run a direction and then basically i would power or not power the second relay based on the direction i want to go where one lead to the motor is hooked to the normally open leg and the other lead of the motor is hooked to the normally closed so if i don't trigger it it's normally closed if i do trigger this relay it's normally open and it's going the opposite direction so anyway let's get this thing all installed and just see how it works and see if my late night coding was you know mildly effective or i was just out of my mind when i did it [Music] on the electrical side nothing too wild we just cut the power that goes to the board which is here and we pulled our wires out that the control board would have signaled for controlling which direction this is running so again thing still operates and on the other side we've just cut all of our wires associated with this carriage so that we can read those in as well nothing too wild oh boy this is where it's gonna get pretty ghetto i need something to put all that wiring in so it's not just like dangling from the thing so uh tupperware some of my wife's tupperware maybe what do you think what do you think old doge chew oh that'll do it craft singles that's a vintage unit right there and i just remembered that most garage door openers actually have a garage door button that someone can hit from their car so if i don't do that in my wife's truck well probably not going to be too pleased with me so i said to myself self better find something that works the same so i had this old little relay that kind of works that you know she could use this as a garage door opener nothing too crazy wild about it here it is here gets the signal and then when the signal's off it shuts off so it should work very similar to a typical garage door button in a car we just had our multimeter set up here so it's testing the connection you can see it's got a connection and then the connection drops off when we release the button that should work out pretty good only place i can think to mount this thing is right about here on the back of the opener we have a nice hole there at the bottom so i'll just transfer that we'll drill a hole and then we'll have a ghetto mounted box with our craft singles logo out [Music] i like to drift away [Music] do i feel more alive today can you help me change my ways [Music] i got everything kind of ghetto rigged here at the moment wires hanging everywhere but you know just to test out we're plugged in so we can see what the thing's actually trying to do so now see we can run her up now i have noticed i have a bug in the system which we'll try and figure out and i'll see if i can make it do it i'm pretty sure i know what i have going on all right now we're going to try and go down this is usually when the issue comes up there it goes it just clicked moved a little bit it's because i have an override in there so i can stop the door partially on its way down and then if it is stopped halfway down or someplace not totally opened or closed it's supposed to come back up but it's jumping into that loop when it's already up and trying to go up again which you know doesn't have anywhere to go so there we go here i'll show that so there we go it stopped now this should go into the override where it automatically comes back up there we go okay so let's find our bug in the system so this is our override loop right here and this is our serial readout where we can see what the controller is doing anytime i write in here a little serial print line it's going to pop over where it prints at so if it's in that area of the program i'm able to see it that time it didn't catch it stopped waiting input gonna go back up and you can see it's in this override right now so there it goes it tried to run override when it was all the way up and it's because i am a dummy and i'm tracking where the door is in these other scenarios but the way a program loops is left to right top to bottom and it's just continually looping and if it's somewhere past these points in the program when i hit the button i don't have anything to tell it not to run the override so basically i need to tell it hey if it's not on either of the limit switches then run the override just a little oversight in my programming so let me change that and see what we have all right so i added this into the override function here where if it's not touching either the contacts that's the only way it can run that loop which i should have had in there from the beginning but also i discovered an interesting scenario where i added a delay to fix it but basically the door would go down fine and then when it would come up it would try and run that override anyway even with those added things in there to kind of interlock the program and what would happen is when the motor would cut off the door would sag ever so slightly and it would actually pull it off of this contact so now it waits half a second after it sees that contact you cut the connection so it should be very much so engaged we can take a look at that little track deal over the beans there we go and it's off and now down she goes it's not too bad i think i'm going to get some weenie slick them up here on these gears so they quit you know deteriorating like they are so we can get as much out of this garage door opener as we can and i think we're good so here it is all done everything's contained in the box now and self-sufficient you know i don't need a computer of course hooked to the thing for it to operate ultimately it'll get a lot smaller when i print a pcb board for it but on a prototype basis this is good enough we'll just leave it kind of raw because you know i kind of like the ghetto look of the thing all right so i think that'll do it for the garage door opener seems to work pretty okay and you know now my wife doesn't have to open the garage door by hand and we can get a little extra life out of this old school garage door unit not too bad and didn't take too long really and just like with uh tuning engines you know programming it's not like how it is in the movies okay you know you test things some things don't work and it takes a few iterations to get things right just like setting up the tune on an engine you make some adjustments take it for a drive see how it goes tweak here tweak there until you have it so with that just snowed outside so next order of business is i better go plow our driveway off let's go fire up the old 1940s ford tractor had a pretty rough ice storm the other day our throttle lever is good and frozen into its spot pretty good oil pressure on this old rig [Music] so you

Channel: ThunderHead289

Views: 40,018

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Id: YN7DdhIdgM8

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 01 2022