Monthly Archives: February 2015

Automatic Alarm for Screen Printing Flash Dryer

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We were recently commissioned to design and build an automatic warning alarm for use with a screen printing flash dryer by a custom t-shirt print company in USA.

A flash dryer is a special heater which rapidly cures the ink printed onto the t-shirt or sweatshirt. If a shirt is left for too long in the flash dryer it will be scorched and ruined, and with a bit more time even the wooden shirt board around which it is fitted can be ruined. Therefore it is desirable to have a warning alarm sound if a shirt is left in the flash dryer too long by the operator.

alarm timer for screen printing flash dryer

The controller we made is pictured above. There is a microswitch on the flash dryer which closes when the flash dryer is closed over a shirt. The user can programme our controller with the maximum number of seconds they want to leave a shirt in the dryer – e.g. 15 or 20 seconds – and then if that time is exceeded the on board relay closes for 3 seconds to sound a loud alarm connected to it.

When the operator opens the flash dryer, the microswitch opens and the controller automatically resets ready for the next time the flash dryer is used.

If you need any kind of automatic sensor or timer based alarm system, email neil@reuk.co.uk with details of your requirements.

New Raspberry Pi 2 Model B – Six Times More Power

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The new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B has just been released, and promises to be six times more powerful than the previous Raspberry Pi models.

Raspberry Pi 2 Model BThe original Raspberry Pi was released around 3 years ago, and since then technology has moved on and competitors have joined the marketplace. The single core 700MHz processor and 512MB of RAM of the recently released Raspberry Pi A+ and B+ make them feel quite sluggish and out-dated, and there are many applications which cannot be used as they run so slowly.

The new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B though has a quad-core 900MHz processor (ARM Cortex-A7) with a full 1GB or RAM,  effectively turned the Raspberry Pi into a low spec PC capable of running the new Windows 10 (which will be offered free of charge for Raspberry Pi to makers!) and the full range of ARM Linux distributions.

The new model is fully backwards compatible with previous models, it will just run everything much faster. You just need the new ARMv7 kernel version of Raspian, and all existing projects will work.

Amazingly, despite the huge lift in specs, the new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B will still be sold for just $35 (around £25-30 in the UK).

Get yours now (in the UK) at cpc.farnell.com.