This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I am working on a membrane testing system for blood contact. Basically when blood makes contact starts to foul the surface and may start to coagulate. This is something I don't want. So we need a fast way of optimising surface coatings/membranes that prevent this from happening. All current systems are kinda shit and not meant for this purpose. We have animal experiments but these are costly and time consuming and not well controlled.
So I have currently a small fluidic loop that contains all the blood needed for the experiment, a peristaltic pump and a syringe pump. The peristaltic pump moves the blood around at the right rate so it doesn't aggregate or get damaged by excessive shear forces. The syringe pump keeps the system pressurised at a certain level. This is the neat part because then you don't need small diameter resistive tubing to do the pressure, which means blood gets less damaged.
I built the 3 syringe pumps from an old ender 3 printer. You should be able to control the pumps through the electronics of the ender but its super clunky. Especially if you want to interface with a pressure sensor and keep the pressure at a set point, via PID control. So I now bought an Uno and a CNC shield so I can do it low level via this. The syringe pump also means I can measure exactly how much flow is going through my membrane which is neat. But lets see if the interface works out, especially on the talking with the pressure sensor. Because the sensor is connected to a different arduino, so I think the simplest way is to send signals from my computer to the Uno based on this. But the nicest would probably be to integrate the control and the sensing together. But I think that would take a bit too long.
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