Hi all!
Thanks for taking time out of your day to read this blog entry. I wanted to talk about the next steps of production, what's happening in the background, and a bit of history around the Digifence.
Like most of you here, I have spent years looking at workshop automation products, but have never managed to justify the costs. I know that they will pay for themselves eventually in efficiency savings, but still. £6k is £6k. A year or so ago I fancied a bit of a project and I picked up a Pi4, a touch screen, a stepper motor and motor driver. I managed to brute force a touch screen interface that kind of worked for this kind of project, but the screen was laggy, the Pi was unresponsive and kept crashing, probably because I'd spent a while not coding anything, and for the life of me, despite all of the available information online, I couldn't link the screen interface and the GPIO headers to control the motor. I lost heart in the project altogether so everything sat in my workshop gathering dust.
The next chapter of the story was more positive. The unit where I rent my workshop was having issues with the roof, and leaks were appearing quicker than they could be repaired. Given that it's inside an old disused cattle shed, and the roof is several decades older than I am, it was bound to happen sooner or later. As part of the works opening more units inside the shed, the landlord decided to replace the whole roof with a new insulated one. Great news, but given it's April in the UK, it means all of my tools and storage have to be moved out until the roof is finished. As much as I love the British spring, it can be wet at times, so no one was prepared to take the risk with the weather. In the process of moving out of the workshop, I packed up the original Digifence parts, some ESP boards that weren't being used, and my Home Assistant server that I was using in the workshop and took them home to have another bash at it.
If you aren't familiar with Home Assistant, simply put, it's a free server application that you host on your own internet network, and you can either link existing Smart Home products together so they can communicate on a common network, or you can do what I do and make your own Smart Home products. My house depends on this box in the cupboard, to the point where I've not touched a light switch in years. Everything is automatic based on where I am in the house, the time of day, and how hot it is outside. There is a whole community of people who do this as a hobby, and it's extremely well-documented. This is where I had a bit of a lightbulb moment, and realised that I could use an ESP32 development board to control the stepper motor, and use Home Assistant to make the dashboards to control it as a proof of concept. If you saw the Instagram post with Retro-Claude, this was the setup. The issue at that time was the Pi was way too underpowered to host a touch screen desktop environment and a Docker image hosting Home Assistant to communicate with the motor, so I'd use my iPad as the interface, but I could still cause crashes by trying to do too much at one time.
Around this point I was researching options and I discovered a line of products that contain a touchscreen and a set of ESP32s built in to create dashboards and communicate over WiFi — a nice and tidy product that looked perfect to slide into the workshop environment. This meant I was able to take resources off the Pi, as it is purely a server and communication device. Now she runs like a dream. The Pi uses its WiFi chip to create an access point that all of the workshop tools connect to automatically, like your phone does when you get home to your WiFi network. It handles the communication and automation between devices seamlessly.
I was hoping with these screens that they could display the HTML dashboards that you see in the simulation demo pages. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this isn't possible, so I had to rebuild the dashboards from scratch to work on these devices. I was a bit gutted to begin with as I'm really happy with the way the dashboards look, but it keeps everything simple and streamlined, and the simpler design for these screens is ultimately the correct decision for a low-powered device that is part of a critical chain in a workshop.
However, this does mean there are options for consumers. If you'd like a full system with a dedicated screen per tool in your workshop, you can, and for not much in the way of additional cost. But if space is limited, or flexibility is more important to you, just use your iPad or laptop connected to the Pi, and you have a portable controller that can be used for all devices.
The more I have worked on this, the more potential I have discovered in its flexibility and customisability, to the point where I can see this being the Home Assistant of the small or home workshop world. Everything has and will be built using products that can be sourced anywhere in the world. The PCBs will be designed to be customisable. The firmware can be customised. If you know what you are doing, you can make your own dashboards with your own branding. Or I can ship it to you with your business logo. The hardware is agnostic. If you'd rather use linear rails instead of extrusion, just get the electronics and make it yourself. There will be well-documented guides for how to make the Digifence yours, and I want to encourage people to customise and share their setups.
I can see a solid future for the Digifence, but for the next couple of weeks, updates will be a little slower than they have been. My van is in for a new gearbox after losing an argument with a pothole, and the workshop won't be ready for me to safely move back in for another four weeks.
Next in the pipeline is to work out how to calculate mitre cuts, which works with all mitre saws, and then recreate that dashboard for the HMI touchscreen. When I'm back in the workshop, I'll get the mitre saw Digifence in. Hopefully by this point there will be a suite of options for consumers to get started with. There is modularity by design, meaning you can start with your mitre saw, then dust collection. Maybe the router lift is right for you next, until you're ready to digitise your bench saw. But my journey looks like this: get the mitre saw in with the Digifence. I'll then create a cut list for building my bench saw outfeed table, which will include the router table, and I should probably tackle some dust extraction along the way.
Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope this is something you are as excited by as I am. I can't wait to get it finished so I can see your workshops and setups.
Love you, bye
Tom