ESP Bottle Filler

[Jerre]

Hi,

I finished another small project that might be of interest to some people here, its a simple control for filling beer bottles, you can connect up to 6 pumps and auto-fill bottles on a time/speed base.

https://github.com/jeroen79/esp-bottle-filler

I re-used an old 3D printer mosfet board i still had lying around, basically its just a simple board with 2 mosfets to control the 12v power to the pumps., i glued on a holder for a small ESP32-C3-XIAO and connected it using jumper wires, i might design a nicer board in the future, but for now this should work.

Feel fee to give it a try and let me know what you all think!

 

[Donoroto]

Neat! I am guessing that the time for filling is determined empirically. And one pump per bottle station, yes?
Any thoughts to adding some kind of 'full' detector? Maybe a probe that sticks a bit into the neck and conducts when liquid hits it. Not sure an IR beam sensor would 'see' through the bottle effectively. Or an ultrasonic level sensor? (Meh. Maxbotics has ones that will work for cheap, but resolution is only an inch.). I wonder how the pros do it?

 

[Jerre]

Correct, its determined empirically and one pump per station.

I thought about adding some kind of detector, or even a scale beneath the bottles, but i thought lets just start as simple as possible and go from there, and initial tests seems promising as it is, the filling is almost the same every time.

But i still have to do a big bottling with it so i will report on it later.

 

[Minbari]

Fill stop could be done pretty easy. Simple opamp with a relatively high gain. Connect 5v to the fill probe, input for the op-amp to a wire about 1" (give or take) from the top. When liquid touches it, voltage will trigger it to stop

Edit: ground might work too and less chance of sparks