I am a big fan of homeassistant and have been using it for awhile now. I have a problem that I need to solve and I have no idea how to start looking at it. Here it is:
My house is in an area without public sewer system and we use a septic tank. In order for this tank to work well and not stink I have to drop a satchel of powdered bacteria in the toilet every week. Trouble is that I forget most of the time so I was thinking I should automate this chore. The question is how.
I was thinking of putting all the powder in a container and the have some sort of mechanism measure an amount (doesn’t have to be ultra precise) and dump it in the toilet. My question is what can I use to measure and drop the powder?
Sounds like you are going to be in Arduino territory with that. It wouldn’t be too difficult to whip up a robotic arm or motor to scoop up something and drop it somewhere. When designing it you will probably want an ESP32 so it can communicate with HA over WiFi and MQTT.
Now, if you want a really lowball solution, you could probably use a pet feeder and some PVC to just dispense some powder automatically, but that won’t talk to HA unless you do some surgery to add an ESP32 or similar. I hacked a pet feeder with an ESP a few years ago to provide an outdoor feeder for the stray cat that lives in our back yard so he could get fed without the raccoons and skunks getting to it.
good idea! I will look into pet feeders! my only concern with this is the powder becoming stuck inside the “feeder”. Pet food comes in small pellets but I shall investigate further!
It may not be a problem, even with powder. The one I got from Amazon was actually pretty decent for $49 and works on a flapper system, so it can “flap” a small amount of food. There are something like 8 flappers so you just program the device for how many portions you want in order to get to the desired amount. I don’t see that powder would have an issue, but you could always crack it open and fortify the bits that cause problems with a bit of silicone or duct tape. I suppose it depends on how fine of a powder. If it’s similar to what I use in my RV for the same purpose then it’s not too fine of a powder.