Hi folks, I was a member at VHS when I lived Vancouver. I’ve moved to the US, and I’m a member at the Charlotte Makerspace.
The org is trying to setup a keyfob based tool lockout system, and I was hoping to reach out and see if VHS has setup TACOS or what the consensus is about such systems…
Hope everyone’s doing fine with all the snow…
Hey Sampath, it’s great to hear from you. Tacos is still very much in development, IE we haven’t fully deployed it yet, but it would be great to collaborate and share ideas. When I was at the Calgary proto space, they had a working key fob system for some of their tools.
Is it more the hardware or the software side that you need help with or both?
Hi John
At this point, we just a have bunch of requirements for what the system needs to do. Ideally we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Obviously the system doesn’t need to be too polished, we’re happy to build the hardware and deploy the required backend, but not start from scratch if that makes sense?
If there’s something we can do to contribute back, do a writeup of how things went, improve documentation or fix some bugs, that would be great.
Would you suggest reaching out to Calgary proto space?
I can offer some points on this.
Our current lockouts are not really adequate and I would recommend something different.
Un our situation, it uses an off the shelf board that i Believe is esp based. It reads from an off the shelf rfid coil that works with our members access cards.
Basically you need to have a contactor for each tool, either already in the machine or added on externally. You set up a basic start/stop circuit for the machine if it doesn’t already have one and you have a NO dry contact connected as a stop. You also have an Emergency stop for normal operation and the start button. This gives you power loss safety, an Estop, and means that your not relying on software to stop the machine, and the software cant accidentally start the machine somehow.
As for the rest of it, I would like our lockouts to track users. Then we can figure out how things are getting broken. Our current ones dont do this.
Figuring out how to log them out is tricky. Our current ones have a button to log out but its often forgotten. We considered timers but its risky to lose power to a machine mid cut sometimes. Possibly a pressure pad but that doesn’t work well if you are cutting up a 4x8 on the tablesaw for example.
We would probably do well to add screens to ours that can indicate tool status and maybe last user/when but this is extra work on an already slow process.
You should reach out to Calgary Protospace, they have an RFID system with access controls, internal payments (and currency), and integration with RFID tool lockouts. They even got their 1980’s pinball table scores connected to the member portal.
Nice people, very friendly.