Fully Automated Dust Collection powered by Arduino _ How To _ I Like To Make Stuff

**Building a Dust Collection System**

It was just a matter of connecting all the flexible tube directly to the tools after that, the whole system was ready to go. If you stopped right here, you would have a perfectly workable and simple dust collection system. I did add a floor sweep on this just to be able to clean up the floor a little bit easier for the automation part of this project.

There are basically three big components that I'm going to walk you through, those really quickly and how they work together. First is the power this is where the tool is plugged in and then gets plugged into the wall here when you turn the tool on and sends a signal out through this wire to the brain. The brain is an Arduino Uno with the shield on top of it and takes all of the input and then decides on how to handle the output.

Part of that output is turning on and off this 30 amp relay which is going to be controlling the dust collector. Another output is the blast gate and it's really just controlling a servo which turns this arm. This arm opens and closes the blast gate.

**The Brain of the Operation**

This is made up of three components, a receptacle, a plug, and a voltage sensor all rated for 15 amps only. Essentially, this is just a receptacle wired directly to a plug but I've cut into the live wire and put it into this sensor. The sensor detects a voltage drop when you turn on or off a tool and then sends out a signal based on that through these wires.

There's an Arduino Uno with the servo shield on top of it that can drive up to 16 servos. It's got its own power source as well. I've got everything plugged into a breadboard here for prototyping but eventually, all of these wires will go on to the shield.

**The Dust Collector**

This is a 30 amp relay it gets a control signal from the board which tells it whether to turn on or off whatever's plugged in here, which in my case will be the desk collector. All the black skates have a servo and each one of those servos is plugged in right here.

**The Blast Gates**

Let's talk about the blast gates. Here's the setup for the blast gates on the laser. We made a bracket that fits on top of here and it holds this servo. This is a high torque RC servo, and on top of that we mounted an acrylic arm that we also cut on the laser. It captures this bolt which is screwed into the gate and as we change the rotation of the servo with code, it opens and closes the gate.

**The Acrylic Case**

I wanted to make a really simple acrylic case to hold the Arduino and the shield so it didn't get covered in dust. I used a website called maker case com to make a really simple finger jointed box and just added in my logo to it since this was acrylic, I had to use acrylic cement to glue it together into a box.

Then we glued it on some magnets and some washers to lock the case and the Arduino up onto the ceiling plate. Then we ran all the wires inside the box and hot glued them onto the terminals so they wouldn't be pulled out from gravity or just from tools moving around.

**Programming**

Right now, we're just trying to figure out the timing to get all of the tools testing their voltage in order to make sure that we're not taking too long in any of them. It's just a lot of code manipulation at this point but we're really close.

After a couple of weeks of working on it, we finally got all the tools hooked up and working. The table saw, the band saw, and the miter saw are all in good shape. The one thing that's not really working so well is the relay for the dust collector. This relay that I showed you earlier is a little bit underpowered for the two horsepower dust collector and it doesn't work consistently.

I've ordered some beefier components and they're on their way now, so once I get them and I'm able to test them out if they work, I'll link them down in the description. Also, down there is a list of all the components that I use for this and a link to the code that I wrote to make the system work.

Feel free to take that code look through it mess with it use it whatever you want. I hope you like this project, I'd love to hear what you think about it down in the comments, and if you want to see some other types of projects, I've got lots and lots of other stuff. If you're new to the channel don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell down there so you get notified as soon as I upload.

That's it for this guys, thanks for watching we'll see you next time