Self-Sanitizing Button Presser and Door Opener- with JLCPCB

Hey everyone! Right now a lot of DIY people are putting their hands and minds to work coming up with new ideas to help address the current global crises. Some ideas are more practical than others but that’s totally OK because that’s how innovation works. Sometimes you have half an idea, play around with it, put it in a box and come back to it in a few months. I’ve been trying my hardest to do my part and mail key supplies out from Shenzhen. Templates and nose bridges for cloth masks, elastic for face shields and filament from local suppliers for people 3D printing protective equipment.

00:53 - But, let’s be realistic- I’m not going to be solving any big problems. At the end of the day, I’m more an entertainer and STEM advocate than I am an engineer. But, I can have a bit of fun with different ideas and maybe help some of you take your mind off these problems for a while. It’s a pretty stressful time- and fear is the mind-killer. We have to stay level headed, calm and rational.

01:22 - So I have a few things I want to build, maybe there’s something to them, maybe I’m just keeping my hands and mind busy, but the important thing for me right now is to keep your spirits up, and maybe give you some inspiration for ways tech can help us through this. As I’ve discussed earlier, the really cool the thing about Shenzhen is how easy it is to get products made. You’ve seen me do DIY from scratch many times, but in the real world, that’s not usually how it works. So in these videos, I come up with a product idea, give it to my friends at JLCPCB and they deliver a sample. Usually simple engineering like this can be done online for only a few hundred dollars.

02:11 - What I want, is a device to open doors and push elevator buttons- because those are surfaces that carry a lot of things we don’t want on our hands. I have an idea to make it self-cleaning with UV light. Now a huge caveat about sterilizing things with UV. The wavelengths that are normally used to kill microorganisms, also kill your eye and skin cells. Far-UVC is safer but so far there are no cheap consumer sources for it. There is also a shortage of the more powerful UVC LEDs at the moment so they cost a fortune. This is just going to be a proof of concept so I’m going to spec some smaller, weaker UV LEDs as kind of a placeholder. It doesn’t make sense to pay a crazy markup and hundreds of dollars just for some preliminary tests. So here’s what the engineer supplied to fit my specifications. JLCPCB has made and populated the PC board- that part of the service is super fast and cheap, and saves me the hassle of SMD soldering.

03:24 - My idea is to laser cut an enclosure for the board and battery out of clear acrylic, but first I have to design it. Yes I use TinkerCAD even for this. Don’t make fun of me- it does the job. Okay, I just wanted to show you something really quick. This is the exhaust arm I used for soldering or when I work with some very nasty smelly glue and you see it is connected to the PVC pipe. It exhausts out all the smell and stuff. But on this site, I also have the T connector that connected to the laser cutter pipe. When I turn this and that and then turn the fan on, all those laser cutter smell goes out of the pipe and there is no stinky smell, no smoke.

04:54 - They all come out from underneath there so it’s a pretty good setup for me. Now I am going to laser cut the parts I need. So this is my Laserbox, it’s from Makeblock. I’ve been using it tons and it’s so easy to use. If you are interested, I am going to put the link in the description box. Okay, so I did the first three too close to the edge, I have to redo them so I am going to move those. Okay, let’s redo it. This is the solenoid setup I have to buzz people in and it is connected with the wire and it can pull the latch whenever people ring the bell. But let’s just say if I were in somewhere very dirty, covered with germs, I am just going to use my hook to open it and the UV light is on because it detects the vibration, it is supposed to stay on for 4 minutes and theoretically, it’s supposed to clean itself. The UV lights stay on to clean itself. I think induction charging would be a bit better than the magnet, but the magnet was easy for a prototype. Once the UV LEDs drop in price, really we’d have to test with bacterial swabs to see just how well it works.

09:07 - Still, as a base concept- UV lights sealed in clear plastic and dropped in your bag or pocket or even your drink to cut down on viral load? Maybe there’s something there? Let me know what you think in the comments. Big thanks to my sponsor JLCPCB for working with me on this, and remember if I can do it- anyone can do it. .