I've populated one of the new boards and have been testing it for a day or so. I gotta say, rolling my own PCBs in Kicad and getting them made by PCBWay has forced me to up my design testing game - I've made many mistakes on the way but have learned a lot and come pretty far in the last few months.

Everything works as planned, including the *new features

• Deposit Sensor
• Dispense Sensor
• Timed Dispense
• Powerbank Keep-Alive
• *Empty Sensor
• *Dark Sensor

Power Consumption

I increased the current going to the IR LEDs and motor. Current power consumption is as follows.

Without RPi

• Idle with Powerbank Keep-Alive and TImer enabled: 18mA
  • Timer uses 8mA
  • Powerbank Keep-Alive uses 4mA
  • ^With both of these disabed it uses 6 mA
• IR LEDs on: 320mA
• IR LEDs and motor on: 510mA

With RPi Zero W and wide-angle camera module

• Idle with Powerbank Keep-Alive and TImer enabled: 220mA
• IR LEDs on: 520mA
• IR LEDs and motor on: 820mA

So with the camera I could get about 2 days out of a 20,000 mAh power bank. Not great, but not terrible.

Testing, Testing

Still futzing around with it a bit before I make a functional test video.

Here's some better shots of the empty sensor on the main baffle that goes in the peanut hopper.

I did make one mistake (aaaaaaargh!) - I left the base of the BC547B NPN on the empty sensor floating and had to bodge a 10K resistor to ground to fix it. I've already corrected this on GitHub and  once I've finished testing I'll make yet another run of boards, hoping that it will be bug free. If anyone else takes the time to build one of these I want it to just work without bodging.

You can see it here (upper right).

So will continue to test. If no issues I will put this board (bodge and all) in the feeder and continue to look for a good location. Here is a  pic of the current enclosure on the stand I built from a wooden pallet I found in the trash pile.