Greetings - noob from Noob Zealand

I've never used one but how do you intend to use a device to measure distance up to 4 metres to measure time ?

Good question!

We have a start / finish gate made out of road cones.

* The measuring beam will point across the gate.

* Normally it will return max distance. (We may need a board on the other side to minimise variations)

* When the beam is broken it will return a lower distance. 

* The connected arduino will need to make sure it is not just a glitch.

* Once it knows its a bike it will send an MQTT message to a laptop running Mosquitto and Node-Red.

* The laptop will then do the timing thing and then look for the beam to be crossed again. 

* On the second crossing another MQTT message will be sent andthe timer will be stopped.

 

"My second project is a still management system. I would like to be able to  manage my alcohol production from ferment to barrel.

Cheers

James"

I was looking at doing something similar some time back. Are you thinking of setting up a Continuous Still using temperature monitoring and a bellows pump to in inject the wash into the "boiler" ?

@expatty

I'm curious, I looked up the TOF400f and it seems to only trigger twice a second. Isn't that too slow to reliably detect the transit of a bike travelling faster than about 15 mph ?

@will Where did you see that? if it is then I have a problem.

I will be using it in the shorter mode so faster response.

If I need to look at something else for the gate then I can switch. But for now I need to get something working so we can work on the rest of the system. 

@mark-bolton

I have thought about a continuous still but for now, it is mostly pot and reflux still function that I am after.

Having said that I have a 100l jacketed boiler that will allow for continuous function, I just need to buy the extra hardware.

@expatty

It turns up in the descriptions where its being sold. For instance

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/274644016264

If you look down in the section labelled Application and Debugging it mentions high precision measurements at 500ms intervals. Perhaps I didn't read far enough.

Reading through the rest, it also mentions "real time" distance measurements. perhaps the 500ms is just for debugging ?

@expatty I was quite some time ago that i ran the numbers. I was doing batch distillation with a 70 odd litre tub and about 1kw heater. I had a re-flux still on it.  I wanted to build something physically smaller and with a much lower thermal inertial so as i could do intermittent runs lasting an hour or so rather than most of the day.  I did the moths and the flow chart but never got round to building a prototype.

I reckon it would be very straight forward project if you already knew what you where doing as far as building the plumbing / heat exchange side of things was about.  At the time none of the "home distiller" subject BBS mentioned such a system except by way of referring to large volume industrial systems.

I was wanting to scale down rather than up.