Paint Flow Control Project, Chapter 3.27, Awaiting Go-Ahead

I've been super busy on a satellite communication project for the past couple of months. It's not all operational yet and I'll report on the project later. Meanwhile, the Paint Flow Control Project has been in limbo, awaiting a go-ahead from Vivid Inc (VividInc). Thomas Nguyen of Vivid tells me that they have a P.O. from the Chinese company to build a couple more controllers. The Chinese company's CEO is not convinced that it's worthwhile to outfit their facility with the controllers but apparently UEI (UEI) has insisted on installing another two controllers to complete a single painting system that requires four controllers for four paint guns. The full complement of Paint Flow controllers should be sufficient to prove or disprove the value of the controllers. So far, the installation of two controllers has improved the painting reject rate of 15% to 12%. It doesn't sound like a big improvement but since they will be painting hundreds of thousands of remote control units, the reject rate improvement will be a big money saving and should easily pay for the paint flow controllers. Hopefully Thomas will give me the go-ahead soon.

I haven't done much work on the Paint Flow Control project, just designing a simple board for the Real Time Clock. I've been using the Adafruit DS3231 (Adafruit DS3231) module, mounting it on a proto board from Osh Park (Osh Park), their "AKA mod of Adafruit BBB Proto Cape copy." The Adafruit DS3231 has worked well in our controller systems, being easy to implement for the Beaglebone Black and quite accurate. Although it is pretty easy to mount the DS3231 module on the Osh Park proto board and wire it up, I wanted to reduce the small effort required to wire up the DS3231 and decided to design a simple board for the DS3231. The board layout is shown below. I used Kicad (Kicad) as before, finding that it does the job for me and now Osh Park can take my Kicad pcb file directly and manufacture the boards.

Beaglebone Black Real-Time-Clock Cape Board.

Osh Park's quote for three of the boards is $30.15 and so I expect to get a few of the boards for the Paint Flow Controllers as soon as I get the go-ahead from Thomas and also I'll order a few of the redesigned Analog I/O boards from Osh Park. That's all for now.