#VHS : Beer Servo Valve

At #VHS, SGNL (among others) started work on a beer fridge for the members. They have all kinds of great ideas, including metering, measurement, internet integration, etc. Metering was already taken care of, and there are some cool plans for user authorization and authentication, but there were still some mechanical things that needed doing...

Of course, as soon as I saw the mixing of beer and automation (two of my favorite things), I had to get on board, so I volunteered to build the shutoff valve mechanism! SGNL had already sourced some smooth little food-safe ball valves, but they were manual control. What we needed was a servo control that would quickly, and repeatably turn the delivery system on and off.

Since I had a ton of perspex kicking around, I just milled from that. If anybody else wants to build one of these things, the NC files for EMC2 are included at the bottom of the post, along with the STL files in case you have a reprap kicking around instead.

Of course, once I had built the thing, I had NO idea if it was going to work. I only had a box of 45 oz-in servos at the time, so I would have to test with those. As usual, I got carried away a bit with the software side. You'll find a little git repo at the bottom of the page.

It turned out that the servos were more than powerful enough, even able to open/close with the meager power available directly from my USB port.


So finally, when it is all put together, it looks kind of like this:

Oh yeah, here are the files;
First, the GIT repo is here:

git clone http://armyofevilrobots.com/git/beer_testificator.git

Then the 3d stuff: