Hi guys! I am Som from India, and I am quite new to the concepts of soft robotics. I have been studying the FlowIO stack and I had some questions regarding FlowIO setup.
I saw that Pump numbers are only 1 & 2, which I am assuming that there are only 2 pumps. I wanted to ask, as observed in the video, there were three modules, and it seemed from the syringe example that the bigger modules packed larger power. Do larger modules have more number of pumps (does not seem to be the case), and if they do not, what is the difference between them and the smaller ones?
I wanted to know more about valves and pumps, and their uses. Is there a nicer resource to know more about them?
I'd be more than happy if anyone would answer my questions. Thanking you in advance!
Hi Som, Having a clearer resource about the valves and pumps being used is a great idea! For now the best explanation currently existing is in chapter 3 of the FlowIO research paper. But there is a lot more that can be said indeed.
The short answer is that each of the 3 pump modules that you see in the video indeed has only two pumps, just different kind of pumps. Additionally, there are 2 version of the pump driver board - a battery powered version (with an integrated charger), and an externally powered version that supports much higher voltages and currents. So for the large pump module, I typically use the externally-powered version, since that pump module is mostly used for desktop rather than wearable applications anyways.
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Even though the existing set of pump modules has only 2 pumps each, I designed the driver board to have enough current-carrying capacity to support even a larger number of pumps! So you can have a module with just 1 pump or a module with 4 pumps for example. So far, there hasn't been an application demanding an alternative number of pumps, but if such a need arises, the functionality is there.
Thank you for the answer Ali! I shall read more about it in the mentioned sources :)