Workshop Dust Control Using Arduino

[Nick]

Those who do any woodworking or woodturning will know that getting rid of dust is an ever present problem and it’s all too easy to use your lungs as a non-renewable dust filter - quite a health hazard with dust from MDF and certain timbers used in woodturning which are known to pose serious health hazards, such as laburnum and iroko. ...

I too am very concerned about dust in workshops as I do a lot of machining... however there is a far simpler way of automatically turning on the extractors by current sensing a "master" line (the tools) and using that to turn on a "slave" (the extractor)... i.e. no manual intervention at all.

EDIT: Response moved to  http://golbornevintageradio.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?tid=4793&pid=51156#pid51156