Quote:
Originally Posted by EricWilliams
My question was more about what kind of projects people have done
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Last year the team I mentor (3786) had a feeding mechanism to push the disks into the shooting wheel. We had a chain with two pushing posts that would go around and catch on the inside lip of the disk and push it forward. We used a photo-interrupter to detect when we were in the correct position to stop. The problem we had was the pulse from the photo-interrupter was too short for the crio to detect (sometime it would go through 4 or 5 cycles before stopping). Anyway, I showed the students how a 555 timer could be used to generate a fixed output pulse when the pulse from the photo-interrupter was fed into it. This fixed our problem and we were able to always detect the position of our feeder.
We used a very simple (crude) prototyping board to implement the 555 timer circuit, but it very easily could have been done with a PCB.
If I was to create a PCB for such a simple circuit, I'd go with PCB Artist (from Advanced Circuits)