I have a HUGE challenge and need your help please

General Discussion
#41

Hi. I am back with new thoughts approaches.
I do not mean to come across as a smart-assed, know-it-all.
Being able to fuel personally owned and worked IC engines has been a life long pursuit, and even occupation of mine.
For me it began with a “100 year” hurricane back in 1962 that killed off had been 30 years very reliable big-hydro power for all here for 60 to 90 days. By 30 days all of the available gasoline, diesel and farm tanked LPG was used up. Those with generators went silent. Thousands and thousands of cash-making long housed roaster (meat) and egg laying chickens died from lack of cooling fans and deep well water. Hundreds of cash-making family farm dairy cows sicken and died from mastitis (milk fever) from no power for the vacuum pumped milking machines. I remember my hands cramping from trying to hand milk out 50-75 cow herd twice a day. Cold-locker storage rental business back then had to lock us all out and hope for power restoration or spoil all.
Then a long decade later getting pants caught down AGAIN in our first Arab oil embargo cut off.

By our 1980 oil squeeze rationing I was prepared.

So Gerrard now your first DO NOT DEPEND ON THEM (outside energy suppliers) life’s lesson.

Internal combustion engines only really need some type of hydrogen’s-carbons fuels along with some oxygen to produce usable working shaft power.
The hydrogen-carbons molecular balance can vary from all hydrogen to all carbons. Extremes are fuctional-use very weird and nasty to use. Blended away from extremes is the best balance for practical usage. Just like whiskeys and people.
In the real world outside of a LAB (or over enthusiastic imaginations) all HC’s fuel will have some tag along remaining too expensive to remove, non-HC’s. Some giving neutral effects. Some actually under in-cylinder heats-pressures be combustion rate modifying beneficial. Most - residue making, maintenance driving drags on daily usable using.
No big deals as long as you avoid “idealism” perfections in the fuels; or the IC engines.

Here in the U.S.of A. long term use of supplied LPG will goo coat the insides of mixers, upper intake manifolds, even intake valves will left behind added into the gas leak-safety odorant sticky crap. Ha! Hafta", Solvents wash clean eventually for movements sticking and metering orifices clogging problems.

I was raised Rural.
I live Rural.
I only think in terms of fuels available, growable, harvest-able, usable by true living self sufficient Rural folk.

Again once you truely know a spectrum of IC engines for fuels those living Urban have lots of urban generated HC base fuel stocks. Tires. Plastics. Kitchen used oils and fats/lards. Used, removed lubricating oils, greases, Hydraulic fluids. Electrical transformer coolants.
Some can be used neat, as-is with just minor heating and filtering.
Some chemically modified and used as liquids.
Most all others jheats gasified into combustible vapor fuels.
Urban fuels wastes always carry clorines and other complex chained cancerous contaminates loadings.

Learn the IC engine ranges of possibilities and you can fuel with damn near anything biological based.
Even dead cats, rats. Even with people.
So why I do tend to pull off from just, ooh-woo, esoteric, fun-fun, technical possibilities into ethics.

Can still smell all of those dead chicken we had to bury. And sickening mastitis infection drippings.

trees smell so much nicer, growing, harvesting and processing.
tree-farmer Steve unruh

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#42

It is amazing what you can do with a kids computer these days. The full automation is rocking. [quote=“Gebsy, post:39, topic:3857, full:true”]
Yeah it looks the part
[/quote]

You have to really admire all the work that went into it to get it to work as easy as that. Using a RaspberryPi with the touch screen like that is awesome just all by itself, but it is like icing on the cake.

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#43

You’re in the right place. And this is actually do-able, unlike the H thing. You’ll get good help here, these guys are great…

#44

Yeah if there is anything Im proud of its that controller. Three years ago I hardly work my cell, now I can control the world with one. There is 50 pages of software with two Ardunio I2C slaves. I created the GUI in that and made it all work. Figuring out how to input and output through the GUI was challenging. There really are not too many examples out there, its mostly writing apps, calculator and stuff with out the use of the GPIO ports. That slider out to servo was a challenge, there is no code examples out there for that. Luckily I had some help from a guy, with out him I could have never pulled this off. Its still my code he just helped get through the challenges.

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#45

Well Matt, I don’t believe being prideful is a good thing so I say this with a little hesitation as I don’ twant to encourage a bad thing, but I say you’ve done quite a bit youcould be proud of.

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#46

I was going to ask how you did it. Are you using rtos extensions on the pi or putting the controller software on a single processor or is it straight up raspbian? Why two arduino’s?

#47

The RPi is only good for High Low outputs and is 3.3v hardware is limited and controlling multiple servos is to much it does not handle PWM very well at all. The RPi has no ability to read analog signals its on ro off thats it. The Arduino code is more complicated and re writing it all in Python on is too difficult to duplicate this code. It is also too much for the front end to process all at once. Its better to use the RPi as a front end only and use the Arduous that are better suited to carry out the task.

All the has to do when you press a button is bus,byt.write (X) and if it sees bus,receive,byte(X) Display this (message). Otherwise it would be very slow and glitchy. The arduino simply sees these bytes and corresponds to it The Slider widget sends a range from 0 to 180 bytes and on the Arduino side we simply store the values in the position. If the Arduino sees the mode set to (Man) then it automatically writes to position that is stored.

Im not sure what you by adding the extensions, Im using the I2c bus in the pi and sending simply bytes to and from Arduino. There are two Ardunos modules one the Gasifier Manager and the other is the Engine controller. To many different instances to try to combine, I tried to get it to work in just one but after the migraine finally went away I went to simple, its just 20 dollar board and I have plenty room to add it. I can more even it better to do it this way so there isnt so much overhead they are just Arduinos. The 02 mixer code can not have anything else going it will crash and will be too slow to respond. Arduino can only do one thing at a time and in 02 mode this is the only thing it should be doing. The other board can then monitor things with out interfering. There will be other modules added with timer code, again timer code dont work with other code that needs to be active.

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#48

There are kernel extensions that turn the linux kernel into a real-time operating system. Which makes it work more like a microprocessor like the arduino, so the latency of the operations in the kernel scheduler are significantly less and more consistent. The -other- way people do it with the multi-core RPi’s is to just dedicate a core to the application. I can dig out the information if you want to try, but maybe you already have.

The RPi’s does not have the pwm’s or the adc (analog to digital) interfaces typically people add them with the i2c or spi interface. Like for an adc you can use a ADS1115 which is like $2.50 for I think 4 channels, or a MCP4725 for a DAC (digital to analog). For pwm you can add a PCA9685 which gives you 16 pwm outputs for $3.50. You can also use them with the arduino.

I totally understand. You most likely would have to use threads which is something else to wrap your head around, and not necessarily the easiest thing to do. The end result may not turn out to be quite as good. I don’t know. It depends on acceptable latency. It is often debated. I was just more curious what you ended up doing. :slight_smile:

#49

Good day GerrardG

Try reading this overall summery viewpoint:

Not perfect. But they have evolved this well in this last 10 years. Note in particular the referenced articles.
Ha! Even digital modern electronics get a half line reference. VesaM in his book in the reference section dedicated a whole chapter to engine modifying electronic controls for woodgas optimization. His four different sized vehicle trailer mounted woodgas system plans are electronical-less. See his youtube video’s and he has decades use-proof evolved these to be self-controlling with longest refuel times and least/easiest maintenance intervals. His are DYI build-able so the user WILL accept responsibly for their use and operations.

Unfortunately GerrardG any substitute engine fueling past supplied pump grade does require an experimenters heart soul and dig-down commitment. You will see this well reflected in forum members.
Beware of slick Ad’s and enticing websites - many asking for buy-in development money for their own “experiments”.
Once developed, standardized and proven then IT becomes the licensed/regulated/taxed pump dispensed consumer fuel.
$500. a year per vehicle road-use tax on LPG here in my State of Washington means all of my engine LPG fueling had been off-road generator and tractors working. Our pump grade gasoline here is taxes at 67.5 cents a US gallon by my state alone. Our state Governor pushing through a 1.5 BILLION dollar carbon-tax-use on all road use of any/all carbons based motor fuels for the 6.5 million living here. Those dollars to go for green energy developments like a border to border Elits-use subsidized electric hyway grid.

Good luck on your fuel endevors
tree-farmer Steve unruh

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#50

I do agree with you Steve that the system of taxation often seems perverse, and can apparently be used for improper ends. I also agree totally with the philosophy of decentralization and skilling up. But the fuel taxes you describe are about appropriate for road maintenance, which is a gigantic public expense. Without fuel taxes in North America, there would be no good roads, bridges, or maintenance to allow driving, so I see that sort of assessment as roughly fair (for the system as it is organized).

For purposes of debate, I would say that commercial interests should pay far more, as it’s the big trucks that damage the roads. They say one loaded semi does as much damage as something like 5,000 cars. If they paid their share, heavy hauling would be done on rails, and road maintenance costs would go way down.

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