Both knee mills (Bridgeport and Pasma) and the Clausing Colchester Lathe are now on interlocks. The Clausing is in the Shark AD group, so if your fob works there is should work on the Clausing.
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Alright, let’s scope creep this, can we get interlocks on the teacher’s cabinets? Then I’ll never had to remember a combo again lol
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This is one of @AmeliaG’s requests. I could probably do it now with minimal development and a Raspberry Pi Zero W. We’ll need to look at the individual cabinet locking mechanism and figure out an appropriate latch integration.
The real reason this has taken 14 months is that I’m it, my DMS time is limited, and I’d like to do some of my own projects. I have not worked on much of my own stuff since I started this.
If you’re serious enough about this to put some time in on the physical implementation, I’ll work with you, but I won’t do it all for you.
We should be able to do a proof of concept with the current software, but it would benefit from a tailored version.
I’ve been working on this as a back burner item. I have a candidate Pi Zero Blister housing. This lets us mount the PiZero outside the metal box so the WiFi works.
There’s also some planning to move to an ESP32 for cost and availability, but PiZero could happen nowish.
Keith @Keith and I was talking about cabinet access control for 3d fab. The cabinet between 3d Fab and electronics has a previous device hanging loose. Important for the 3d Fab’s ability to deploy it’s “Maintainer” program.
Tell Keith what we need to buy and I am sure he would get it or approve it.
If you need us to help with printing any enclosures, happy to help.
Indeed this would be ideal for us and I’d be happy to put in work to make it happen. Just let me know how to get started. I’ll be up tonight if you want to have a chat. Thanks!
The parts list is the relatively easy part.
What I really need is someone to collaborate with on building this. Someone who can agree on, assemble, and install the hardware.
- There are a variety of latches that might work. We need to agree on what to use and how.
- We’ll need to power whichever latches we choose.
- I can draw a schematic, but someone will actually need to implement it.
And there are bunch of questions like:
- How do we want this to behave when power fails? Stay locked, or unlock. If it stays locked we probably want a mechanical backup. More complexity. If it fails unlocked, then all you need to defeat the interlock is to kick the plug out of the wall.
Please hold … We are rallying the troops. 
I’ll be in this evening if anyone wants to chat f2f
We have a small group from 3D Fab and CA that can help for cabinet locks
Requirements
Assembly
Install
I can not be up there tonight. U around Sunday for a quick discussion with the group? If so, what are some time options? I know there are a lot of committee mtgs on Sunday, but we can likely find a time for an intro discussion
Thanks
Can’t make Sunday, sorry. Zoom is even unlikely (It’s Stanley Cup Playoffs man!)
Should be in Tuesday (5/8) until I start a 7 PM class, and Wednesday until the 7 PM Electronics Committee meeting.
Ok. We will find a time
Appreciate all the help we can get on this folks.
I would suggest that you hold off on the cabinet use case until we complete at least version 1.1 of the Interlocks which will be based on ESP32 compute hardware and potentially a lot smaller and more flexible to support this kind of thing. The migration to ESP32 was discussed in the last IT meeting and is a reoccurring topic for the IT team moving forward.
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