Water vortex display from SJ City Hall exhibition -- repair and upgrade

I built this project a few years ago with a friend to help get him interested in mechanical design. Later, the project was adapted for display at a "tech and art" exhibition at San Jose City Hall. After 8 months, the painted steel impeller began to rust and discolor the water in the tube. I took the device back to my shop and replaced the original aluminum shaft with a stainless steel shaft, replaced the shaft seal, and changed the impeller to an all-plastic design. If I were designing the device again, I would opt for a spring-loaded PTFE (Teflon) shaft seal, which I have used with great success in other applications.

Drill motor control:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yEABsNyRfo

Original video showing the WiFi-controlled watering can and vortex tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKrlRJ-GJms

Web-controlled watering can and vortex tube

UPDATE: Code added at the bottom of this post.


This is an interactive art project that I have been building for an upcoming exhibition. The idea for a web-controlled watering can come from the first "iphone watering can" that I helped build with a friend for Maker Faire a couple years ago. Search the internet/youtube for "iphone watering can" for details.





This new version uses a different drive mechanism and a PD control loop to make the watering can track the desired position in realtime. The interface works with any webkit browser. My collaborator and I have discussed using the iphone or android accelerometers to achieve control through phone tilting. I'm not sure if the tilt data is available to the web browser, though, and we are trying to make the interface run on as many platforms as possible. Any ideas?

The siteplayer webserver is extremely old technology and has many problems, but does work. I would explore using a hacked WRT router in the future for similar projects.






HTML file from Siteplayer webserver:
http://www.magconcept.com/watering/can.htm.txt

SPI file from Siteplayer webserver (simply to establish a server response):
http://www.magconcept.com/watering/serial.spi

Arduino code to get serial data from webserver and effect the PID control loop
http://www.magconcept.com/watering/watering_can.pde