Final Wire Terminations and Testing

Final Wire Terminations and Testing

Date: 5.22.18 and 5.24.18
Location: Logan HS
Time: 5 hours
Students: Dom and Thomas Kujak
Goal: Make final wire terminations, wire solar panel and work out voltage issues on the micro motor vibrators.

We had another work night after school to make the final connections. The fuse box now looks much better without all the wires hanging out of it.

The 555 timer circuit had to be redesigned because the output was only designed for one motor. Some parallel resistors were added to the circuit and we changed around some outputs and it now works well with four motors. Dom resoldered much of the circuit to make it functional. Andy K. did the orginal design which helped us get to where we are now with it.

The design of the solar panel circuit was discussed and we decided to wire it straight into the box rather than direct to the battery. We will have two 10 amp fuses in that circuit. We did some initial testing and the power on LED in that circuit still did not want to work so we need more time to troubleshoot it.

If you scroll down to the bottom of this page you can view one of the more important videos of this project. We completed our pump test. We have three pumps (Evap. Circulation, Condenser Circulation and Evap. Tank Pump) and we needed to see how well they controlled the water flow and if we had any external leaks. We did have some leaks which forced us to tighten and add a few more hose clamps, but we had it under control in a short period of time. We also found two electrical wiring problems (pumps wired to the wrong switch) and corrected that.

The way the system is wired and fused after we did some re-wiring is the Evaporator Tank Pump and is on the Evaporator Peltier #2 Switch sharing the same fuse. The Evaporator Circulation Pump is on the Evaporator Peltier #1 Switch sharing the same fuse. The Condenser Circulation Pump is on the Condenser Peltier #1 Switch along with the Circulation Fan sharing the same fuse.

In our inital tests we were able to move water and control flow very well. Now we need to do a longer system test to see if we can produce water clean. This will come after we get a new 12 V battery because the one were were trying to use will not keep a charge.

A quick look at time spent on this project puts us at about 225 hours right now. The vast majority of that is after school time.

Final testing on the DM project will be next week.

Raw materials needed to build junction box for solar panel.

Completed box with plexiglass top. Fuse, switch and LED fabricated into the top cover.

Working out wiring up to solar panel (14 V) and battery (12 V). This proved more challenging than expected.
The circuit has two power sources feeding into it. The LED would stay on no matter what the switch position
was. Using two switches will work but we are looking at adding a diode or resistor to simplify.

Thomas starts to disconnect the outputs for the motor vibration units in the condenser.

Seeing the power indicator light go on on the motor vibration circuit is always reassuring.
This unit will then be mounted in the circuit box.

Testing the pumps to check water flow and control.