I’ve got a brewery with 2 fermentation tanks. They share the same glycol pump but of course have separated valves for the glycol flow. I have not been able to drive the pump and valve from the same cool chain. Is this possible?
At the moment I share the pump Actuator block between the tanks. The problem is that there will be a drift between the PWM cycles for the valve and the pump. That is, sometimes the pump runs against a closed valve. And at other times the valve is open but the pump is not running. I would like to let the PWM control, in this particular case, 2 pins, the valve and the pump. Is this solvable at the moment? I saw that Elco mentioned the Step View Widget and creating macros, but I cannot find this widget.
This functionality is often requested, and is indeed on the backlog.
There are some hacky workarounds involving mutexes and inverted pins, but they work only so-so.
The macros you heard about can be found in the quick actions widget. You can use those to open the valve when you enable the cool PID. They can’t be used to synch PWM cycles.
Thanks, I will look into these options then. I had a plan to hack it with diodes from the valve steering, to control the pump that way. But that solution would not be particularĺy elegant either…
There is a learning curve, but overall I am very impressed with what’s already possible today. And I would assume that it would definitely ease things up with the PID adjustments if it would actually cool when activated.
