Modern woodworking tools are amazing, allowing you to make any number of useful or decorative objects from the comfort of your garage. Unfortunately, they also produce a lot of dust, so YouTuber “Atomic Dairy” came up with the idea to install an air purifier that can cleanse the shop air eight times per hour. This only works if turned on, so he automated its operation with an Arduino Uno and a solid-state relay (SSR).

The AudioBot system uses a microphone to listen for loud noise, indicating that a saw is on and thus dust creation. When detected, the Arduino then signals the SSR to run for two hours to literally clear the air. 

There’s also a start button and RF control unit to trigger the fan for an hour or add an hour to the current run time, which is displayed on a small LCD screen. A stop button cuts off the filter immediately when needed.

Our Fanboy wood shop air filter is an overpowered air cleaner that we run whenever we are cutting or sanding wood projects in the shop, which is often. The AudioBot is an Arduino device that turns the Fanboy on whenever it hears us using a large tool like a table saw or miter saw. That’s right, it works by sound! This relieves us of the tedious task of plugging in the Fanboy when we work and remembering to unplug it a couple hours after we finish in the shop.

Could we just have bought a timer to use with the Fanboy? Yes. But it wouldn’t be sound activated and wouldn’t have all of the cool LEDs we have on the AudioBot. Plus the AudioBot only cost around $30 and it was REALLY fun to build. So in our shop the AudioBot is better than any commercial timer we could have gotten.