DIY floats

[GasSavers_maximilian]

Wow, that sucks. My handwriting is terrible even without any electrocution! My uncle has a small cannon he can't ever fire because he lives in a suburb in CT. I'm trying to convince him to "loan" it to me.

[dkjones96]

It was a temporary loss of use(about 3-4 months) but still not the same.

Those phototransistors will work with the floating dowel idea. Just put a flag on it to block the light to it. Do you know what kind of light they need? Looks like UV.

[GasSavers_maximilian]

They say they are infrared. I believe I have some IR LEDs kicking around.

I like your home brew idea, though. Started off with lever switches in mind, but to keep it smaller, I think attaching a metal plate to the top of each float will work better. Still working on the details.

[GasSavers_maximilian]

Found a decent float material at the dollar store: flower arrangement foam. Unlike a lot of it, this has a very small cell structure, so it'll take a coating of polyurethane nicely (to protect it from the oil). Cheap as chips.

[dkjones96]

Nice! I'd take one of your prototype floats and sink it under oil for a week or two to see how it does.

Dumb question, but you are using water-based urethane right?

[GasSavers_maximilian]

Yes, water based. Not a dumb question at all.

I'm thinking of using a central tube that the floats ride on. They'd have a plastic bearing so no wear would occur. All the wires would run inside the tube to keep them out of the way and come out through holes where needed. Each float would have a sheet metal disc (flashing, really) on top with a flexible wire attached to it. Coming off the tube is a L shaped arm that the common is hooked to. At least that how I'm envisioning it. Tried to coming up with a simple way to not require wires going to the floats, but given the short distance they'll move I don't see it being a problem. I guess i could have two spring loaded arms that touched the disc, but it just seems harder. This arrangement allows it to be easily shoved inside an external pipe, and keeps all the wires and such inside.

[GasSavers_maximilian]

Duh, the disc should be on the tube, not the float. Keep the float as light as possible. Now I just need to figure out how to build this thing. Foam's a bit crumbly, but my bandsaw cuts it neatly enough. Used the Easter egg dunking approach to coat it, and that stuff should prevent crumbling anyway.

[dkjones96]

I've been doing a lot of reading about the Arduino microcontroller base and it's amazing what you can do with that stuff with such little effort. It's giving me so many ideas for this! A full LCD setup with capacitance sensor. Ooo!

[GasSavers_maximilian]

Awesome. I'll take a look. I dimly recall an ODBII project used an Arduino...I think. Thanks for the heads up.

Oh, yeah, my oil tank project's being held up by the limited selection of tubing sizes I can get locally. Lowes has a pretty good selection so I'll just grab some when I go near there next.

[dkjones96]

They make one that uses VSS and injector pulse. Can't be worse than a kiwi.

http://ecomodder.com/forum/opengauge...-computer.html

An actual ELM327 uses RS232 for communication. There is no reason why you couldn't build a custom scangauge type system.