I’ve been progressively automating everything around the house and decided it was time to automate the workbench as well. Still working on the dashboard and some of the finer automations I have my soldering iron on a timer w/ presence detection, Lutron picos that turn on my lights and equipment, and my most favorite the dashboard for my test setup.
Before I turned a knob, oh the manual labor of it [feign a faint] -
Video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/KtcY3m6m4khsQ3jF7
Now I tap buttons - So easy, such wow -
Video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Lm46LPwPc2BxhLPw5
The toolchain here is pretty convoluted
HA Dashboard → Node Red → (Telnet) → Esp-Link → (TTL to RS232) → Signal Generator → Gauge under test.
Flow for static speed button presses. It uses a HA Helper Number to store the desired speed, the dashboard updates the value and NodeRed detects the change and formats and sends it off.
Get Freq, is a function that lets me query what the equipment is currently set to and update the dash if needed
The sweep is managed within NodeRed, the SigGen has a built in sweep function but it has some limitations that make it problematic in this use case. Basically it bounces between a min and max setpoint w/ a one shot trigger to get everything started. The gate common to both flows and ensures that when the sweep is running you can’t send other values.
I could/can/may eventually update the sweeps to load a data table into the SigGen with values and transition times. This would let me do more steps/finer control but this is working well so don’t feel especially compelled to until I need to.
Next up is to pull in data from the scope via LXI/VISA so I can close the loop and validate equipment set points.