UC Santa Cruz

Nowadays, signal transmission and control have become crucial. The discussionrevolves around how to control more efficiently, rapidly, and economically. Specifically, for instance, the digital signals needed to control a switch valve, where 1 represents open and 0 represents closed. The overall experiment requires a significant number of digital signals. This article will delve into how to construct the switch controls for numerous valves and integrate it into automated control applications. In biological research and experiment, valve control systems are frequently used. For example, a low-cost microscope named ’Picroscope’, which can be used for simultaneous and longitudinal biological imaging, is reported. Programmable valve controls system is pivotal. In this work, efficient electronic circuits and software controls are studied and built for this similar purpose with more cell plates and less bulky hardware components at low cost. Our valve control system consists of a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, the Adafruit PCA9685 16-channel servo driver boards, and the servo motors. Using these hardware components that process through I2C protocol, the valves can be adjusted in a general way by python programming on the microcomputer. Namely, the valves can be opened with any angle for arbitrary duration of time and closed at any time. With two I2C protocol pinouts and multiple secondaries (Adafruit) circuit board, the entire system will be able to handle thousands of valves.