Context
On Mars, water is an important resource for drinking, watering crops, cleaning, and various other uses. To collect and conserve as much water as possible, I created a device that collects water vapor from the air through condensation and funnels the collected water to a collection chamber for easier use.
Mechanism
It senses temperature through a DHT11 sensor and once it goes under a certain threshold, it closes the arms using a stepper motor. It will stay closed until the temperature rises up again. For the demonstration, you have to use ice-cold water and manually set the threshold to be close to the temperature of the room so that the device triggers more consistently. The arm mechanism is closed using a small spoke attached to the motor. The spoke has strings that are attached to the arms and when the spoke rotates, the arms go toward the center of the spokes. To open the arms, the motor rotates counterclockwise and the weight of the arms naturally opens up the machine. The main Arduino components include the stepper motor and the DHT11 sensor.
Code
The code makes use of 2 libraries, the built-in Stepper library, and an imported DHT library. I received the DHT library from this site: Lib. The code has 2 main blocks. The first block is when the device is past the threshold and the arms are marked as open. This block closes the arms and sets them as closed. The other block checks if the temperature isn’t past the threshold and the arms are marked as closed. This block opens the arms and sets them as open.
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