El Capitan Foods
Custom MCU control rigs for an old tortilla-chip production line
Overview
El Capitan Foods
Custom MCU control rigs for an old tortilla-chip production line
A Summer and Fall at a small startup retrofitting an old tortilla-chip production line — cutting, baking, frying, seasoning, weighing, bagging — with custom microcontroller setups built on protoboards.
The work was hands-on: spot bottlenecks, poll the employees, understand the corresponding machine, design a device to address the problem, solder it together, and get it to behave on the line.
Design Room
I can't show show images from in the factory, but I can show my device development. This is my office. Also the conference room, kitchen, and occasionally bedroom. Startup, what can I say.
Retrofiting Equipment
Some setups interfacing PLC machinery, some were purely sensor driven. This image was the board I used control nitrogen flushing of the chip bags right before they were sealed by the bagging machine. It received feedback from an ultrasonic sensor and an inductive proximity switch and controlled a solenoid valve to coordinate bursts of pressurized nitrogen with the bagging machine.
Protoboards in production
The control rigs were custom MCU setups on protoboards — not pretty, but expected to run reliably in a real production environment. To the right is the board for the custom seasoning machine I built. Brushless smart motors, relay circuit, raspberry pi, numeric control pad.
An internship of getting my hands dirty: real machines, real soldering, real production constraints.