Solenoids Used for Waterfall Display

Many of us have seen a few of these waterfall displays before. But this water display has some very impressive patterns. The room lights were dimmer so the effect would be enhanced. These systems use many solenoids which are computer controlled to drip at the right time.

Basically, it has 3 solenoid valve blocks and each has assembled a board with shift registers and MOSFET arrays to be able to drive the solenoid valves. The master-AVR pushes the data via SPI to the shift register and also controls the various valves.

These patterns are kept on an EEPROM and can also be changed via UART. The solenoids used here are also cheap.

Click here to see the rest of the project.