DustChamber

F2labs has a product safety, and compliance lab located in Damascus, MD as well as offices in Indianapolis, IN and Cleveland, Ohio. I was tasked with interviewing the engineers and lab techs to understand the problem at hand. F2labs looked to upgrade their dust chamber and had begun building a new custom chamber. The Purpose of the chamber is ingression testing, following NIST Standard IP60529. This standard describes requirements for certain products operating in dusty conditions and ensures safety. Conditions like pressure, temperature, humidity and other factors are used to perform the test. These conditions needed to be monitored during each individual test. This required frequent visual checks by the testing engineer to ensure that conditions were being met during the test and therefore proved very time consuming and disruptive. Instead of manually monitoring and controlling these functions during each test, F2Labs engineering management wanted an easy to use application that would automate this process thus saving them time. By utilizing an inexpensive Raspberry Pi, I wrote a pythonic program that would utilize the various electrical components, including multiple fans, a heating device, a vacuum pump, lights, current sensors, touchscreen LCD, Raspberry Pi, and more. The applications consisted of various functions represented through a GUI, written with Tkinter. Functions that not only ran the desired test, but tested components for validity. For example, the current detection function; a current sensor was placed on the fans, setting an alarm if the current went below a certain point, informing the engineers that the component had failed. Utilizing threading, various functions can run simultaneously. They are currently using the device and spend a fraction of the time setting up tests and performing each test. They plan on deploying the software on their other chambers located at their various offices.