Guides Switching things with Raspberry PI + Relay Board

MacGruber submitted a new resource:

Switching things with Raspberry PI + Relay Board - Switch devices on/off or switch between E-Stim channels using a Raspberry PI.

This is a quick DIY guide how you could switch devices on/off or switch between E-Stim channels using a Raspberry PI, a Relay board and the Connect plugin directly from your VaM scene using triggers. No soldering needed.
We are using mechanical relays, which means the current that runs the Raspberry and relay board is completely isolated from the E-Stim devices. Also the...

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this is great, thank you!
you could even take the pump and the release solenoid from a blood pressure device to inflate / deflate the plug.
there is also a pressure sensor inside these units, and they are really cheap.
so many possibilities.

Great work!

I wonder if it would be possible to read a potentiometer and use it to drive an animation pattern... do you know if this would work with a Raspberry Pi PICO connected by USB to the PC?

GordaDivina said:

I wonder if it would be possible to read a potentiometer

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What you are looking for is an AC/DC converter chip you can connect to your Raspberry. It converts a voltage like 0....5V into a binary number, say 0...255. There are different variants of such chips: Some block a lot of GPIO pins for each such chip. Other chips use I2C or SPI protocol, which allows you to connect multiple such chips with I think just two or four GPIO pins. Never tried this or work with this, though.

If you are just looking for some simple way to input, like start your program, change settings on the fly or whatever, note that you can also just connect a USB gamepad to a Raspberry PI.

MacGruber said:

What you are looking for is an AC/DC converter chip you can connect to your Raspberry. It converts a voltage like 0....5V into a binary number, say 0...255. There are different variants of such chips: Some block a lot of GPIO pins for each such chip. Other chips use I2C or SPI protocol, which allows you to connect multiple such chips with I think just two or four GPIO pins. Never tried this or work with this, though.

If you are just looking for some simple way to input, like start your program, change settings on the fly or whatever, note that you can also just connect a USB gamepad to a Raspberry PI.

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That's a great idea, thank you!

So I recently ordered a Maustec Edge-O-Matic, and it should be here this week. I had an idea, that is basically the same thing you said at the end of this post, where an atom in a VAM scene can react to data from the EOM and/or send commands to it. While i don't have the device yet, I have been doing some research into it, and it seems that it is already capable of sending and receiving data via websocket, and it also supports serial communication. This manual goes into more detail. here as well. While I certainly lack the skills to make that work, It seems like it wouldnt be too difficult for someone who knows what they are doing to create a plugin that can send and recieve commands to/from the EOM. If this is still something that interests you.

senorgif2 said:

If this is still something that interests you.

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Sure, it should be "fairly easy" to make work, just too time consuming for me