Distance Measurement

[DaveE]

Good Afternoon

I am about to set up a system to measure the height of a stack of boxes passing under a wenglor OPT 2011 laser measuring sensor attached to the Samba SM35 I have.

 

The plan is to put the sensor looking down onto a conveyor belt and use a analog input from the sensor to tell me what voltage input I am getting in, from there I can convert the number of bits (probably through linearization - but not sure)

The only issue that I can see is that the sensor is measuring down from the top, therefore the conveyor belt is 10 volts and the top of the stack is 0volts

This is one of the times I need to be standing on my head!

 

The sensor has the ability to be taught the range of distances that I want to be valid, making it easy for me to set the above range.

 

I will be using another sensor to tell me when to start my distance measurement.

 

So at the end of this ramble does anyone know if linearization work backwards like I need it to?

 

If it will I want to be able to save the linearized value in in a MI to count the boxes that go through and keep adding the number of the boxes up until the end of the run.

 

From that I need to print to a thermal printer using RS232 communication how many boxes have been printed (that bit should be ok, as I have done enough communication to be dangerous)

 

Thanks for reading, any advice welcome

 

 

[cantcliff]

Yes, you can plug in the numbers backwards.

 

I've made this mistake on occasion working with analog sensors and couldn't figure out why I was getting unintuitive results.

 

 

You should be able to use the linearize to set the count (I'm unsure exactly how the rounding happens) so from an analog reading (Not distance but actual input count) of 1000-1300 is one box, 2000-2300 is two boxes, etc.