Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | I noticed you mention the batcher system I referred to. My system is really very basic and it is just used to measure the total batch size. All our batches are mixed in the mixing shed which is an older machine shed. It contains several tanks for pure water or fertilizer and totes or jugs for the small quantity products.
The usual procedure is to start the transfer pump to introduce water or fertilizer into the sprayer, planter or tank truck. We then add the smaller quantity products into one of two cone bottomed tanks where they are "sucked" in through the pump along with the carrier. These products are measured by using meters on the chemical totes or measuring containers. I don't use the batcher system to measure the low quantity products as I don't trust its accuracy for small quantities. The products all pass through a 2" Raven flow meter on their way to the sprayer, planter or truck.
My batcher just displays a running total. It has a reset button to reset the total back to zero for a new batch and other buttons to change the meter cal if necessary. I use the reading on the display to decide when to stop adding water or fertilizer to the batch.
At first I used a Raven Flow Max for this purpose. It worked fine but the display was small and hard to read at a distance. I fooled around with some Arduino projects the next Winter and decided to try make my own display using the Raven flow meter. I used an Arduino Nano connected to a somewhat larger four digit display to duplicate the Flow Max.
Last Winter, I made a new batcher using an ESP32 microcontroller. The ESP 32 has built in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It also supports ESP NOW which is a way for two or more ESP32s to communicate with each other. I use one ESP32 as the "Transmitter. It is connected to the Raven flow meter and a four digit display like the Nano but also transmits the running flow total to the "Receiver" which is another ESP32 wirelessly. The Receiver is connected to a large 4 digit display. This means I can read the running batch total from either the Transmitter or the Receiver.
I could expand the programming and use some buttons or a keypad to enter in a certain batch size. The microcontroller could then use a relay to Start/Stop my electric transfer pump at a certain batch size. I don't plan on doing this since I'm right beside the pump anyway and just turning it off myself when the batch size is met isn't very hard.
Here's a couple of pictures. The Transmitter is first, then the Receiver, then the pump and flow meter. The large display could be used to display other information if desired. I don't know what the range is but it is adequate for my situation.
Edited by tedbear 1/2/2025 07:59
 (Batcher II (full).JPG)
 (Batcher Remote (full).jpg)
 (Batcher I (full).jpg)
Attachments
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 Batcher II (full).JPG (79KB - 5 downloads)
Batcher Remote (full).jpg (104KB - 4 downloads)
Batcher I (full).jpg (137KB - 3 downloads)
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