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Cherry Picker Revival

Chris from Hutchings Timber got in touch to see if we could help revive this NiftyLift cherry picker that they use for general maintenance. The old control system had expired, and it was not possible to source a replacement. After some discussion about exactly how and what they needed to control we suggested that one of our Pro-360-S models could be made to work. Long story short – it now works a treat and has saved this £20k machine from the scrapyard.

A NiftyLift cherry picker that had its obsolete control system replaced with a 4QD Pro-360 controller

Surveillance Robot

Martin from Tek-tanks got in touch to see if we could help sort out some problems he was having with this mighty machine.
It’s an extremely powerful 4wd surveillance robot. It has integrated GPS for autonomous missions and also FPV capabilities. It is powered by LiFePo4 batteries with a sophisticated charging and monitoring system. All of this kit makes for a very crowded installation with a lot of different power supplies and control systems, and these have not been playing nicely with each other. Our task was to evaluate what was causing the issues and to help create a more reliable system.
We fitted two of our Pro-160s to handle the motor drive side, and then spent some time looking around with a scope. We discovered an incompatibility between some interfaces, some ground loops, and some power supply contention issues. Martin was under time pressure to get the vehicle working for a demonstration to a potential customer, so we devised a temporary control system that got things moving again. A few days later the interface problems were resolved, and full autonomous operation was restored.
A four wheel drive autonomous surveillance robot.

Plant Watering Robot

The guys at Team Sprayers built this laboratory robot for applying water / fertiliser to plants over 20 years ago. The old RS motor controller is obsolete now so they asked us if we could re-create the control system for them. We used one of our Pro-160s set up for push button operation, wired in some limit switches, and tweaked a few settings – job done!

A plant watering robot

Hydraulic Pump Control

The guys from Osbit and Hyserve brought this heavy-duty test rig into our workshop. We’re helping them develop a hydraulic pump control system, this is using a 5kW series wound motor to drive the pump which will be used in an off-shore application. They need to be able to limit the system pressure by using a hall sensor to detect and limit the motor speed. We’re using one of our Pro-360-HCs which has a hall input. Initially the sensor gave strange readings but we tracked this down to the hex heads of the bolts being used to trigger it. 5 minutes with a hacksaw and the system was running smoothly.

hydraulic pump test rig

Seed Spreader

Tom from Tramline Tec came to us with an interesting project to upgrade the torque of an automated seed or fertilizer spreader. He had integrated high accuracy GPS with some clever software to control and map application rates for seeds and fertilizers at a very precise level across a field. The problem was that the output of the logic unit was not strong enough to drive the rather chunky motor attached to the spreader particularly with some of the larger seeds envisaged. We created a small custom PCB to provide a voltage divider / low pass filter for his output signal and then fed that into one of our Porter 10 controllers.

Here it is in action…..

Youtube video