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By Zachary, November 30, 2011 11:14 pm

We are bringing back the blinking lights!

Last time, we spiraled lights up around the north end and placed lights around the inside of the south end. This time, we will be leaving the south end lit only by the lights in the pool and the north end will have random blinking lights.

The above image is very important to using and understanding the north end lights. Inside of the gray box is an Arduino that is programmed to randomly turn on and off the lights (code here). The physical box is set up to receive power from two locations. First, the Ethernet cable that plugs into the board supplies power to the Arduino. The wires are labeled with scotch tape. V+ is the positive and GND is the negative. It runs on about 5V. The main power cable attaches to the bundle of green wires and the single back wire. [Ed note: You'll have to figure out which is positive and negative. I'm just a lowly CS student] This cable should run on 120V.

With all of this ready to go, we should have all of the lights working by next week.

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By Zachary, November 16, 2011 10:43 am

Through a series of unfortunate events, we are shutting down the fountain a bit earlier than usual. But we’re getting ahead of our selves. Let’s start from the beginning.

On Thursday, Madison had a very blustery and cold day. There was snow and wind, and everyone was generally unhappy with the whole situation. Someone was particularly unhappy with the running of the fountain. Apparently, the wind was blowing water from the fountain onto the sidewalk and into people’s faces. To alleviate the problem, Dustin was asked to shut down the fountain. To do so, he remote connected into the server and shutdown the fountain via software. After shutting the fountain down and then leaving to go to class, Dustin saw the fountain was still running. He ran to class and used RDP on his phone to try to shut down the fountain. After class, the fountain was still running so Dustin had to open the manhole cover and manually shutdown the pumps. (Note: the failure to shut down the fountain may have been due to a crashed cRIO).

With the pump off, the water stopped flowing and everybody was happy. The water level sensor had other ideas. It seems that after banging on the water level sensor, instead of being stuck off, it was then stuck on! When the water level sensor is tripping, it tells the pool to drain. Because the sensor was stuck on and the pump was off, the south end pool drained completely with the lights still on. When Dustin saw this, he realized that the pool needed to be filled so he turned on the pumps. Well, hot lights + cold water = explosions everywhere! The four lights that we replaced and got working exploded and shot glass everywhere. Needless to say, there was a bit of panic involved.

One of the things that we had been warned about was that nobody knew where the glass lenses for the lights came from. We were afraid that the fountain lights would not be operational during the winter. However, it was just our luck to find a box of replacement lens. We needed four; guess how many were in the box. Four. You really can’t make this stuff up.

On Saturday, Dustin and his brother Taylor, went out to fix the fountain. They cleaned up the glass, replaced the lenses, and acid washed the water level sensor. With the sensor cleaned and functioning properly, most of the lights resumed working. Only one of the four blub sockets was damaged beyond current repair. We will resume repair in the spring. After completion, the fountain resumed normal activity with three lights on.

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By Zachary, November 9, 2011 11:24 am

When one thinks of engineering, complex plans and well thought out solutions come to mind. This is true for many aspects of engineering, but when it comes to the real world, you’ll find that the solutions are not a elegant as you would hope. We had a problem for two and one half months where the lights in the south end pool were non-functional. We knew the there were shorts in the wires, but we didn’t have the time or expertise to figure out what was going on. This Tuesday, Dustin and Alex tried to test the water level sensor power box to see if they could short out the input to trick the lights and have them turn on. They found that the sensor was giving the same results when the pool was full and empty. Then they did the next logical thing, bang the water sensor with a wrench! After making a few loud clangs, the lights came on. There was probably something stuck inside the senor, but we’ll never know for sure.

Moral of the story: When in doubt, hit the pipes with a wrench. That has fixed a lot more problems with the fountain than we’d like to admit.

After “fixing” the water level senor, the remainder of the meeting was dedicated to preparing the holiday lights. We were able to find the controller box for the lights, but it was in a big mess of cables. It took us a bit of time before we were able to finally untangle all of the lights. After opening the lights control box, we found the homebrew Arduino setup. We ripped the chip out with some make shift wire and will begin programming it next week.

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By Zachary, October 26, 2011 9:50 pm

It was another interesting night for Enlight. We have been trying our hardest to get the north end fixed, but the fountain is not cooperating with us. The solenoid that fills the north end is working and responding to the water level sensor but is making a terrible grinding noise. Water is flowing in the pipes, but we don’t want to take the chance the something is broken and could overflow the pool. We’ve also encountered a pipe that is leaking badly through the insulation wrapped around the pipe. That stretch of pipe and insulation will have to be replaced.

On a good note, we were able to make the control room a bit quieter. We disconnected the weirs from the main air feed. Because the weirs leaked air both above and below, we always had to deal with the hissing. Now we don’t have to! Later that night, we also went over the LabView and C# code that controls the fountain with the new members.

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By admin, January 15, 2011 6:45 pm

The seasonal white and red lights that are on both ends of the fountain are still shining brightly!

The excellent wiring job by all those who helped especially Richard and Dustin has kept the breaker from being tripped this year like it did in years past!

Here are some photos of the lights installation. Thanks to Dustin for braving the cold!

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By Zachary, December 9, 2010 7:54 pm

As the winter continues to get colder and colder, working on the fountain become more and more difficult. There is ice all across the base of the south end and getting the lights onto the north end is hard when you have to safely scale the tower.

Right now, we have accomplished one of our tasks. The first task was to get lights put up on the north end. If you walk by a night, you will now see a ring of red light atop the tower with a spiral of white lights. This is a change from the years past. Normally, there would be computer controlled lights playing different patterns instead of the static lights. No worries though, the computer controlled light will still be around.

This year, we have plans to put up the computer controlled lights on the south end. The big issue with this, though, is power. Right now, there is a box in the fountain that has a single power cable and a single non-terminated Ethernet cable. This is good enough to get the controlled lights up, but we also want to be able to run lights down the spillway as well. For that, we would need another power. The box that the two cables are coming out of has a bend somewhere in it and we haven’t had any success running another line though it. We are hoping that next week we will be able to install the second power line.

Besides having problems with that cabling, we have also had cabling issues setting up the north end spillway. It seems that no one remembers how to attach the cables or even where most of the cables are. Right now, both lines are just a few feet too short to be attached to anything. To top that all off, there appears to be algae growing inside the south end of the fountain! Where there is standing water, there will be algae. We topped that off with some algaecide. Hopefully that will help the light in the pool shine brighter.

There issues should be addressed by next week Tuesday. For now, please enjoy the lights on the north end and do not touch the fountain. Dustin reports that the metal is rather cold.

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By Zachary, March 17, 2010 8:41 pm

Today, we’ve started the prep-work of turning the fountain back on. The north end mister is now offline, and the lights have also been removed. This weekend, we plan on cleaning out the fountain and eventually get it on its way to activation. This semester it is very important that we learn everything that we can before Chris M. leaves. Failure is not an option (unless you work at Ian’s Pizza, in which case you can take liberties with the word “Engineering”).

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By Zachary, February 9, 2010 10:11 pm

That’s right! We now have working lights! Its seems that after the code was completed, the cable that connected to the lights was damaged. With that replaced, the lights are now functional and flashing. In addition to the lights, we also have the North Misters working. The full display of Enlight’s grandeur is now in full swing!

Awesome images after the break!

Continue reading 'Lights, Lights, Lights!'»

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By Zachary, December 16, 2009 9:58 pm

Wait… Where are the lights? OK, so the lights aren’t quite up a soon as we wanted and the code just recently got finished, but you really can’t blame us. It’s been, like, super cold and coding is really hard.

OK, fine so we dropped the ball, but it’s going to start getting cooler soon (no pun intended). Right now, we have some working prototypes that can turn on and off lights, and the code is currently being reviewed for bugs and the like. Hopefully, if all goes well, we will eventually have lights. Even if it takes us to the end of the year (fingers crossed).

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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.