Drip Governor - A most valuble first hack

[Pete]

Pete - I think that what you require is a diaphragm pump

Sold!

The challenge with these ones is that there's no feedback of any sort - you don't know how many cycles it's done.

I assume these are going quite fast, I'll find out soon enough, couldn't we just use the mic input as a mic, quick FFT and then you have pump frequency....?

With that said, I can see the attraction of Rylan's design. A pump would give you direct control over the water level but often that's not actually the best approach. The direct electromagnetic valve approach seems fairly simple and is definitely mostly analogue, which would make integration easier.

I'm open to this but I'm still not convinced...I was playing with water in a tube the other day to sense drips (turns out saltwater gives nicer pulses than tap water but surprisingly not because it's more conductive [I'll post some captures later in the week]). I'm concerned having done this that pressure may have more to do with flow rate in a drip system than a valve, if you take the original concept of reservoir on top of reservoir then the head changes constantly throughout the print and could be siginificantly different at start and end. I don't know if this is solved if the head is >>higher than the print but then I imagine this would be more of a flow valve than drip governor?