[Lab] Electronics help

[Toby Murray]

Hey everyone,

I new here and dropped by the ModLab last week just to poke around, and it
seems like a pretty cool place. I have a rather large project in mind and
I've run into some difficulties with my complete lack of
hardware/electronics knowledge. To that end, I was wondering if anyone had
some free time/brain space to help me plan things out and give general
guidance.

I have a rudimentary understanding of the Arduino environment from the
software side, I don't see any problems there, and an almost non-existent
understanding from the hardware side. With that in mind, I'm looking to
control some water. I already have an Arduino, a tank, two solenoid valves,
and a couple pumps to play with. My issues revolve around upping both the
current and the voltage of the Arduino to be able to toggle the
solenoids/contactor of appropriate size for the pumps (if this is even the
proper way to do it? Went to Active Components and they had nothing that I
thought I needed, which made me second guess myself). I think I've come up
with a possible solution from mixing and matching specs I find on the
internet, but seeing as I've almost no idea what I'm doing I'd like to go
over it with someone who's done this kind of stuff before. Especially
before I go buying random extremely specific components...

To that end, I'm putting out this call for help. Anybody feel like jumping
in on this? Doesn't have to be in person; email, instant message, texts,
phone -  it all works.

Any help is appreciated!
    - Toby Murray
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