For a while I have kinda struggled with humidity in my apartment. Opening windows doesn’t do much and gets uncomfortable after a while when it’s really hot or cold outside.
So I purchased a dehumidifier some time ago. It worked great so far, but it just didn’t behave like I wanted it to.
So I thought I’d make a small project out of it to see where I can push it. After opening it up, I quickly realized that the control circuitry is buried deep inside the device, and since it quite expensive I decided against opening it up further. So instead of directly interfacing with it, I had to get creative.
The dial on the top was also plastered with rivets, and I didn’t want to do anything irreversible.
So I went for my only idea I had left – even though it felt a little bit awkward: letting a servo turn the dial and leave the rest of the device alone.
For that I quickly whipped up a 3D model of a little clip for the servo to grab onto the dial, and of course a holder to have the servo stay in the required position. After a bit of measuring I based the holder design on the clip I used to upgrade cardbot. The first version fell a bit short, so I had to adjust the length of the pillars and print it again.
I used 3M glue pads to hold the holder in place.
I needed to tweak the code several times, as well as fix a huge oversight I had at the start, which just made the arduino switch the positions after each time out.
I’m really happy with how this turned out though. Maybe I’ll replace the two potentiometers with static resistors in the future, so I can use them for other projects.