CQ with AIR

My Son and I are working on a project to automate; 20 air driven punches, with a similar strategy that was used by the old "pin printers", but our project will be on a much larger scale.

The planned punch printer will be much larger and much more powerful.

Air will be used to drive the punches and will be controlled via 12Volt air solenoids. I have previously posted the a description of the single test FET Driver that will be used, and which will be controlled via a microprocessor. The planned circuit for the finial product will consist of three stacked boards with 8 FET Drivers per board. The Toner Transfer of  the Prototype board is shown here.

Eight Circuit FET Driver Board

a Toner Transfer Prototype

To test the FET Driver, I needed a microprocessor to produce a test signal that would be easy to use.

From a previous project, I have an "Adafruit Trinket" microprocessor programmed to produce a "CQ" on one of it pins. A simple jumper was used to connect the Trinket to the FET Driver.

Trinket Sending CQ

The results was "CQ" being taped out by the air valve.

Air Valve Sending CQ

Once the air valve was connected to the cylinder,  . . . things got MUCH more interesting, and VIOLENT!

For this test, the air pressure was set at about 5 psi (34.5 kpa), for actual or normal operation the pressure will be about 40 psi (275 kpa). (I think I have the unit conversions correct)

Believe me, the following video does NOT fully capture the loudness or intensity of being - "ON THE AIR with AIR".

Pounding Out - CQ

Sorry for the rotated video (I will avoid that mistake with my future videos).

The test of the FET Driver? - It works great, . . . and I now know what it really means to "pound out" CQ.   :-)

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