Potential Accessories?

[Bartlett-Will]

Hey FirstBuild,

Thanks for open-sourcing this cool project. I was catching up on your YT channel on all of the potential accessories you guys had planned. Is there a future commercialization plan for those, or would it be possible to to have those plans uploaded as well?

I'm especially interested in how the humidity booster worked out with your beta testers, and the potential for temperature control.

As a side note, there is no information on how the water tank was controlling the water flow outside of the .step files which do not include the tank itself. Do you have anymore information that you could provide to help with the journey of making, and modifying the designs presented?

I appreciate all the work you guys put in on this.

[Bartlett-Will]

As a follow-up are there any common failure points of the current design?

[rdsuel]

Hi @Bartlett-Will, sorry it's taken so long to respond! The humidity booster was a neat idea but we ran into multiple challenges that made us decide not to take it to full scale production:

The first issue was that the piezo device would clog after a few days and stop working, even if we used distilled water. Once that happens, it's difficult to get the piezo cleaned (we tried vinegar with not much luck).

The second issue was that we wanted to drive the booster using the same power plug that the fan uses without updating the firmware on the product. Since the fan plug is PWM-driven, it was difficult to convert the slow PWM signal for the fan to a higher-frequency PWM for the piezo (we did this using a couple of 555-timers I believe).

You may be able to try updating the firmware so that the humidity fan PWM frequency is the same as whatever piezo humidifier you decide to try ... there should be some on amazon (ultrasonic atomizer) and seeed may also have something.

The water tank for Mella is actually a re-purposed Opal Nugget Ice Maker side tank. The water flow is purely regulated by gravity, no fancy mechanisms involved.

Hope this info is helpful!