A few years back I posted
on here about my dust collection solution that was a work in progress. It's worked quite well for my center bench/table saw area, I don't even have to think about turning the collector on when at the table saw or using my planer. It has drastically cut down on the dust in the shop from me forgetting to turn on the DC in the first place.
After some time of using it, I've learned a few shortcomings of the setup and wan to improve upon them. The circuit that has my radial arm, band saw, and drill press is also on the one for my office. The current solution works off of some sensors on the main panel sensing usage on the circuit and toggles the dust collector on. This has been problematic with the addition of the laser, 3d printers, and when I'm doing soldering, which all seem to trigger the DC to run. I've got a physical kill switch at the controller and also have the relay power coming from my lights in the shop, which won't allow the DC to be turned on if the lights are off.
I'm wanting to automate the gates also for the tools being used. The cost of electronics and sensors becoming cheaper and cheaper has made this quite affordable. My first step is to build a little network of devices that can work together and sense when tools are being powered on. I was able to do a proof of concept this week to test this, but I still need to work on the timing a bit.
Here the left microprocessor is acting as the server, it's LED will come on when power is sensed on the processor on the right, mimicking my relay. These are talking wirelessly and can respond almost instantly to any tool coming on/off. They can also talk bidirectionally, so I can use the child nodes to open/close gates at the tool. The current solution runs the DC for about 10 seconds after all the tools turn off to clear out the lines, so will keep that feature on the new one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAW5efp4CDE
I've also got a web server that a mobile phone can hit to toggle the DC on/off manually or can manually from any node using physical switches that are connected. Nice thing is that I'll be able to move tools and new triggers as I need to without having to re-program or open up my panel, everything should be pretty modular to make the setup easy.