Transporting the kiln in the back of my car along with the fact that the stainless outer case fixings were mostly broken almost reduced the kiln to brick dust during the 100 mile trip!!
After removing the old kiln sitter, there was no going back!
After lots of research and reading I had come up with this prototype design. It was far from complete but after some firing schedule simulations I thought it was ready for the next stage.
When I started this project I had a multimeter and a serial JDM programmer and very little experience with electronics; over the following months I bought odd bits of test gear from Ebay. The picture is a thermocouple simulator, I used it to feed-in simulated temperatures to the controller.
When I started sampling the thermocouple voltages in my PIC16f877A my readings were inconsistent, and I had no idea why! So I bought my first cheap analogue oscilloscope from Ebay, and after a week of working out what the hell all these knobs and controls are for I realised from the scope display that it was actually the thermocouple simulator and other sources that were producing noise on my A/D line; luckily as the noise was intermittent but predictable I could actually filter it out in the software.
This was a 240 AC voltage power test to make sure my 80A Chinese solid state relays were working.
This is one of my father-in-laws stoneware slip-cast animals for test firing, he is a truly amazing sculptor and all self-taught too!
This was during the first test firing. The kiln was only firing on half power as it was plugged into the mains wall socket. This was good enough for a simple firing test but the final setup will use the full 22 Amps with a dedicated power cable and a suitable breaker; Also in order to check for the correct operation and to make notes, I supervised it throughout, and yes! it was a very long day.
This was the finished stoneware piece.
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