Comments (0)

By Katie Anderson, August 7, 2012 8:08 pm

After a month of back-and-forth email with the Physical Plant, we got the go-ahead to turn on the South End pump! Once we did, we found out she’s working almost perfectly, with just a few disconnected spray jets and a misaligned spray nozzle – but these are all easily fixable. Unfortunately, a possible electric problem means we had to turn off the North End until later in the week.

The sad news comes from the South End, where the big jets are “on” all of the time. This means that if we left the South End running, it would flood Engineering Mall. We have pinpointed it to a stuck horizontal ring valve, which means we have to contact the physical plant – again.

Here’s hoping we can at least have one part of the fountain up and running by the end of the week!

Comments (0)

By Katie Anderson, July 13, 2012 12:29 pm

Feeling left out of Enlight? Thinking that the summer is just too long to go without your fellow Enlighters around? Want to know what’s going on down below while you’re gone? Well, we finally have our network camera up and running!

Go here to view (see login information sent via email to Enlight members): http://enlight.engr.wisc.edu/fountain-crio-8069/

For your viewing convenience, we have set up a public guest account, of which you will have received login information if you are a member or Alumnus of the Enlight Fountain Control Group.

***Please Note*** Multiple people can log in at the same time – and since the camera is interactive, please don’t be alarmed if the camera’s view “jumps” while you’re logged in.

Have fun, but don’t all log in at once!

In other news, we had an attempted visit by one of our past Presidents, Mr. Jason Malinowski. Unfortunately, we were experiencing some down time, so he didn’t get to see the fountain at our best – but hopefully he will come back sometime soon to visit.

TODO:
We have noticed multiple air lines have begun to pop/crack, one of our trusty (but rusty) grate hooks cracked in half, and some screws in the North end have literally disintergrated. …Basically, work is never done for Enlight!

Til next time!

Comments (0)

By Zachary, June 27, 2010 9:51 pm

You’re at Enlight!

We recently replaced the weirs in the spillway of the fountain. We got new cylinders to replace our corroded ones.

Continue reading 'Weir are You?'»

Comments (0)

By Zachary, June 6, 2010 6:31 pm

This summer, Enlight will continue to be active. Today, we worked on getting the fountain back into working order. If you had been past the north end of the fountain, you would have noticed that the pool was full of green algae and nearly overflowing. The south end was only half working because of damage to the pipes in the basement. Leaving that part of the fountain on could have caused extensive damage to the pipe and created water damage in the basement.

The north end was a relatively simple fix. We shut off the water, scooped out the large pieces of garbage and algae, and dumped in algae-a-side and chlorine tablets. We’ll have to come back in a few days to clean the dead algae out, but at least things can start getting back to normal levels. We also switched out the controller for the water level sensor. Hopefully, it will keep the pool less full.

The south end took a tad bit more work. Underground, big pipes carry water to the jets on the fountain. Over time, the pipes shake and cut into the fiberglass insulation. When this insulation wears down, there is a possibility that the pipes can shake hard enough to break apart. To prevent this, we cut out small rectangles of sheet metal and rounded them into tubes. After draining the pipes, we lifted the pipes up and slid the metal underneath the damaged pipe section. This metal should prevent further damage in the future.

While this should be all of the major maintenance for the summer, we look forward to getting the weirs in front of the fountain working as well as other smaller projects, both around the fountain and office. If you are in Madison over the summer and would like to join or just hang out, email our mailing list at enlight-members@engr.wisc.edu to find out more and get involved with Enlight.

Comments (0)

By Zachary, April 20, 2010 11:46 pm

I mean fountain…yep, fountain. A lot of work has recently gone into working on the getting everything about the physical fountain working. For the first time in a while, all of the valves on the fountain are now working properly. It took four valves and some realignments to get everything working again.

Take a look at their work!

Continue reading 'The Death Star is Now Fully Operational'»

Comments (0)

By waterppk, March 24, 2010 4:38 pm

I ordered a few “Water Overflow Alert”s from Harbor Freight – PN 92334 – with the hope of integrating them into the cRIO and provide and alert to us if water was present in certain areas under the fountain.  I finally got to tearing them apart this afternoon and found a pretty interesting circuit:

The two chips are actually just a set of Schmitt Triggers (HEF40106B) and a set of NOR gates (HEF4001B), they use a set of transistors to drive the black cylinder (which contains all of the audio amp/alarm-music/etc) and set off the speaker.  I eventually found an output on the Schmitt that goes +1V when the alarm goes off, which I’ll run into the cRIO and let us know when water is present:

I was really surprised by a few things when playing with this circuit – I have a radio playing in another room about 20 feet away tuned to 105.1FM, which, after cutting the speaker wire because it was driving me nuts took up the job of playing the sounds for the water level detector.  The interesting thing is that it would play the musical alarm when the multimeter was on the negative battery terminal and the output that goes high when the alarm is sounding – otherwise the radio will play the “siren” alarm sounds when I flip the switch to that setting with or without the multimeter.

Another interesting effect is touching the circuit anywhere sets off the alarm – I mean anywhere.  You can brush across the power input wires and even though they’re being cleaned up by a transistor and a capacitor on the way to the chip it still sets the alarm off, but not as loud as touching the sensor input wires.

Comments (0)

By Zachary, October 21, 2009 8:03 pm

Fall is in full swing again, and you know what that means. It’s time for the weather to start getting colder. It’s time for people to start wearing their festive brown and gold sweaters. And finally, if not most importantly of all, it’s time for the trees to start dumping their leaves directly into the fountain drain such that the entire south end shuts down!

Of course this is totally normal this time of the year and, as such, we call upon the ranks of Enlight to clean it out. The cleaning process is relatively simple. After hoisting the wet/dry/heavy vac up the ladder out of the manhole, we lift the grates covering the spillway in sidewalk. Then all of the leaves are lovingly sucked out.

In addition to the basic cleaning of the fountain, we also decided to look into which valves are not functioning. V2, V6, V9 (vertical valve, not the drink), V Lower Ring, and H ring on engineering hall are non-functional. The three vertical rings may be just broken valves. These can be replaced. The rings are a more difficult case. It is entirely possible that they (or just the H ring) were/was never originally hooked up to anything.

Finally, we will soon be adding a new feature to the drain way of the fountain. As you may or may not have seen, there are flaps in the spill way. These flaps used to be controls by pneumatics, but water has backed up into the pneumatic system. We are now working to replace these valves and, when finished, hope to create an awesome wave pattern as the water runs down the back of the fountain.

Comments (0)

By waterppk, December 22, 2008 6:04 pm

Before the snow fell we were able to fish up some wires to run lights on the North End Tower.  We’ve previously run lights in the Engineering Expo Office and on a tree on the Engineering Mall but that typically turns into a mess as it is difficult to prevent people from destroying the lights or computer controlling the system when it’s exposed and when there is less snow.

We started by running new wires up into the pool/tower this fall.  We ran a single feed of 120VAC which will be disconnected before refilling the pool with water and we also ran a single terminated ethernet wire up to the top of the tower.  The reason for choosing ethernet is that it gives us 7 analog channels, more then enough to cover the tower in lights, and is cheap and readily available (thanks CAE!).  Now having our wires up we needed to get to work on a sealed box to put the control electronics/relays into and get the lights strung up on the tower.

We initially planned on Pulse Width dimming LED holiday lights with the National Instruments CompactRIO, however that quickly was put off citing the difficulty of building the hardware, so we decided to start with simple solid state relays which will allow us to cycle the lights at up to 60 times per second (which would typically be fast enough for PWM, but not with unsynced AC current, as you’ll get random behavior).

To sort out the hardware we first started by building a test board on a proto-board.

The picture above is the PWM setup, note all of the extra hardware to syncronize the solid state relay (SSR) with the incoming AC current, this is necessary to switch in the controlled fashion to regulate to duty cycle and therefore trick the eye into seeing a dimming and brighting lights.  The above board only controls a single channel, the board soldered up and shown below controls all 7 channels, you can see why we initially opted for a simple on-off control of the lights:

The next step was to create a waterproof and weatherproof box to put the control curcuit into so it can be safetly mounted to the tower.  I went to Menards and picked up a PVC electrical enclosure and some bulkhead conduit wire fittings.  Then it was off to HarborFreight to pick up the world’s cheapest NPT tap set to we can thread the plastic and run the bulkhead fittings.

Taps plastic very well, I’m not sure I’d run it into a piece of stainless though

The control board fits nicely into the box, after this picture stand-offs were added to get it off the bottom of the box and closer to the input/output connections.

Next up was to finish assembly of the control hardware:

And to get the software written for both the Server:

And for the Compact RIO:

The final step was to get outside and string up the 7 strings of LED holiday lights, 2 red, 2 blue, 3 white and to get the default patterns written for the server.

The final step is to write control code to allow the Kiosk to run as a control point for the lights to allow local control from Engineering Hall, and finally to get lights up in the Calipers and to PWM them so the caliper color can be controlled.

Comments (0)

By waterppk, November 3, 2008 10:04 pm

Today the fountain received a new transformer courtesy of the UW Physical Plant.  Despite us not knowing they were planning on getting us a new one, we took it in stride and made sure to have the manhole opened for them:

Lowering the Transformer

We had eight electric shop employees, two service vans, a service truck, and a boom truck to help the transformer into its new home.

Beautiful Fall Day on the Mall

The old transformer converted the main feed 480 Volts Alternating Current into a 208 VAC to run the four pumps and 120 VAC to provide power for all of the controls equipment and wall outlets.  The old transformer suffered a great deal of water damage and had recently collaped into a pile of rust on the floor:

Old Transformer

Comments (0)

By waterppk, September 3, 2008 4:09 pm

While I was working in the North End Pool I slipped on the algae on a grate and dropped one of the ~50lb grates back onto it’s tray.  Of couse this wasn’t without consequence, as it turns out that the grates also rest on a metal conduit that runs out of the basement and feeds the water level sensor wires.  As you can see, the damage is quite clear:

The conduit comes directly out of the conduit and the cable to the left is suppose to route through the conduit and through the fitting still on the cable, this is called a water tight bulkhead fitting as it contains a rubber disc (like a rubber stopper from chemistry) and seals around the wire.  Unfortunately, the bulkhead, being steel, was so rusted that it would be impossible to loosen the fitting and free the wire.  So the first step is to head below the pool into the basement and document the wires.

After taking a few pictures to make sure you can reassemble the wires after you’ve fixed them (and ditching the wire nuts that tend to suck up moisture and destroy the wires faster that keeping them together [we like soldered and taped connections]), we’re now ready to CAREFULLY use a hacksaw blade to cut the fitting back off the wires without damaging the wire and therefore having to replace it since it lives its life submerged in a pool of chlorinated and salted water!  We’ll also have to get the threaded piece of the bulkhead fitting back out of the conduit coming from below the pool, again, without damaging the threads and compromising the seal.  The first step is to get out our hack blade, hammer, and flat head screwdriver.

Using the hacksaw blade and sticking it into the conduit and then carefully sawing what remains of the threaded fitting is an excellent strategy for removing a fitting rusted into a female thread set.  Once i’ve cut four times through the threads, I can use the screwdriver to pry out each section of the threads until they collapse on themselves, allowing for easy removal of the remaining threads.

The final step is to cut the other half of the fitting from the wires without nicking the wire insulation.  This is relatively easy because the rubber seal is about 1/4″ thick and completely surrounds the wires.  As you can see the external section of the bulkhead fitting was significantly corroded after spending 7+ years at the bottom of a pool.  The top of this image is where it was broken off the conduit, the lower part was where the seal was present, and where water leaked past and eventually deposited enough lime to stop the leaking.

The fitting was then replaced with a plastic one with a rubber seal to completely avoid a future corrosion problem, this fitting will of course be as subject to break as the old one, but it’s better that way than corroding away.