Electronic Circuits and Projects Forum

Waterfall printer or limited budget pick one.

The hardest part of that entire project will be the valves themselves, everything else is really not that complicated or expensive. I'm just guestimating but there's probably a good 500-600 electrically actuated water valves. If they're 5 dollars each... well you do the math. Find cheap valves and you might get the cost down to 1 or 2 thousand dollars for something of that scale. Go for smaller valves or make them yourself and skies the limit, depends on how good a fabricator you are.

I did a 10 second Google search and that's about what I found too, I'm sure you can do better if you research the valves though. The pressure in this system is very low, the aperature is high though, the biggest problem would be desigining the water holding vessle to avoid water hammer and keep the pressure low, actuating low pressure switches is very easy.

You can probably make all alpha-numeric characters with 5 valves per character and 1 valve between characters for other graphics. Thus you could start with a few valves initially and scale it up later.

You might try Ebay for cheap solenoid valves.

Originally Posted by kagan09

im going to do a small one first with the budget ive got or it could be upto 500$AU i guess. im going to use micro valves and use a microcontroller to control the valves which recieves a bitmap image from the PC. but im confused about the process putting it together. The more technical parts

To control it from a PC you would need a control module (plug-in or USB controlled) with one addressable output for each solenoid. You may need an amp to drive the solenoids from the controller output, depending upon the controller's current capability.

Then it's just matter of programming the solenoids to open in the sequence desired for a particular graphic or words.

With 5x7 high alpha-numeric characters, it looks like you would need the same control program that would be used for a scrolling message display.

Another one: YouTube - Awesome Water Fountain in Japan

Ken