Somnus Is Live, and So Is Popper Bot
Somnus is out in the open. First thing built on it: Popper Bot.
Toys are easy. Timing is the hard part.
Anything you drive by hand you are also deciding about. When to start. When to stop. Whether that was enough. Every one of those is a little door back out, and you keep taking it, because your hand is right there on the thing.
Somnus shuts the doors. You hand the timing to a track, and the track does not negotiate.
What it actually is
Toys under computer control, driven off an audio program. Load a track, the system reads it, and everything you have connected does what the track says. Nothing to hold. Nothing to time.
The track was already keeping time for the session. It may as well run the hardware too.
The name
Somnus. Roman god of sleep. Came to people in the dark and left them somewhere between awake and dreaming. Seemed about right.
First out: Popper Bot
Popper Bot hangs off a gas mask and doses on the program's schedule instead of yours.
Air first. A CPAP keeps air moving through the mask the whole session, so it never turns into a bag. There is always something clean coming in, and the dose rides on that flow rather than replacing it. Build it that way or do not build it.
Linen, not liquid. A strip of linen sits soaked in a little glass vial. Cloth holds onto the liquid and gives up the vapour. It means the thing can hang off your face at any angle and nothing runs out. An open bottle would have been on the floor an hour ago.
A fish tank pump. That is the dosing mechanism. A cheap aquarium air pump blows air down through the vial and pushes the vapour up into the mask. One moving part. Nothing clever. Somnus holds its switch, and the track decides when it kicks on and how long it runs.
Take the files
Two printed parts and a bit of tubing and you are most of the way there. STLs to print, Fusion sources if your mask is shaped differently and you need to move things around. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Take them, change them, print them.
On the board
Two more in the works.
Milker. Does what it says on the tin.
Outlet. Puts a machine on the same leash as everything else.
Neither is written up yet. When they are, they land here.