Dust Collector full bin sensor

[Travis Porter]

I have had a few issues with forgetting to check to see if my dust collector is full. To the point that i have overflowed the drum for my cyclone and got the cartridge filter slam packed with wood chips. :embaresse

So..... Last year Touchwood came up with what I considered a neat full bin sensor with a small amount of electronics, a strobe light, and garage door sensors. Check it out.

First off, I mounted the garage door sensors to the underside of the lid for my drum.

Then I wire this up to the strobe lamp.

And you would think all I had to do was plug it in and I was done.....

Unfortunately, that was NOT the case. The space I had in between the bottom of my cyclone and the top of the drum was insufficient to get the drum in and out.:BangHead:

Which meant, I had to take apart my cyclone and raise it up by 6 inches higher on the wall.:BangHead:

This added an additional 4 hours to the project. The way it works is that when the sensors get blocked for a few seconds the strobe light starts flashing. It works well overall with one exception. That exception is when I am using the wide belt sander. I get false positives because the sensor eyes get covered with the fine dust from my wide belt sander. It doesn't happen with anything else including my belt disk combo, just the wide belt. I am going to try to put some rain-x on them to see if that helps, but otherwise, this is definitely a positive addition.

Thanks Don!!! :icon_cheers

 

[McRabbet]

Travis, as you know, I also have one of Don's sensors. If I recall correctly (IIRC in lexicon parlance), the circuit has a built-in delay that should eliminate the false positives. One other strategy would be to rotate the bin cover to change the position of the sensors relative to the incoming stream of dust (it follows a spiral path down the cone into the bin) -- you may have one of them in a constant stream of dust and it is covering the sensor eye quickly. Too bad you don't have a ClearVue or you could see where the dust path is strongest and weakest. If you don't believe me, PM Jim Murphy to see his CV.

 

[Travis Porter]

You are right, it does have a delay, around a 10 second delay, but I still get false positives with the wide belt. When I take it off to check it the sensors "eye" is covered in dust. I will try your suggestion on rotating the lid to see if that makes a difference as I hadn't thought of that.