“This project documents how I modified our GOJO LTX-7 soap dispenser by reflashing it with an Arduino firmware.
Apparently the GOJO LTX-7 and possibly similar models are Arduino ready. They are powered by AVR Tiny48 (256B RAM, 4K FLASH) and have row of PCB pads that provide access to the ISP signals for programming.
IMPORTANT: once you reflash your soap dispenser you cannot restore the original firmware. If you want to be able to restore the original firmware, replace the ATTiny48 on the board with a digikey ATTINY48-MURCT-ND IC and install the stock IC back to restore the original functionality.
To reflash the soap dispenser I soldered a row of header pins that connects via an adapter board to an Arduino supported programmer (the one I used in Atmel MKII).
The arduino sketch I programmed is minimal but sufficient for our needs. It doesn’t performed some of the advanced functions of the stock firmware such as current and voltage sensing, RFID, etc and just performs a basic functionality of activating the pump motor each trigger it gets from the IR proximity sensors. To do that it needs to sense the motor position switch to stop the motor when reaching that ‘parking’ angle and it controls the motor via 4 power mosfets in H configuration. The sketch uses only 3 of the H bridge modes (motor off, forward, forced brake) and doesn’t use the reverse mode. The number of pump strokes (each a single motor revolution) is software programmable, the stock devices are programmed for a single stroke, we prefer two strokes per activation for extra soap. The Arduino sketch also puts the MCU to sleep between activations to reduce the power consumption.
The Arduino sketch uses the ATTiny48 Core by Spence Konda https://github.com/SpenceKonde/ATTinyCore which also sells AVR Tiny boards on Tindie in case you want to do some independent ATTiny development (the boards are not required to run Arduino sketches on the GOJO soap dispenser). You will need to install the ATTIny48 Core in your Arduino IDE to be able to compile the Arduino sketch. The IDE setting uses is documented at the top of the Arduino sketch.”