Rigging sensors

[landon2345]

Team 2345 is currently looking at rigging 4 garage door sensors to create 2 trip lasers to track ball movement inside the robot. Any ideas about how to connect these devices to an outbreak or sidecar in order to receive feed from the devices. All we would need would be an on and off signal.

[Miner]

You would need to look at what connections there are on the sensor. If you had someone with a sensor installed on their garage door then you could just take a multimeter and see what leads are the power, ground, and signal. There may be more than one signal but I doubt it. Testing a working one would be a great way to find out. You may have to wire a custom connector for it eventually though.

[Racer26]

I imagine there is a signal line coming out of those sensors already, you just need to figure out the pinout and hook the signal to the cRIO, however, you may wish to go with a lighter and (cheaper?) banner sensor, which has come in several previous years kits. I also recall receiving a 2part laser based setup a few years ago. (2006?) You should check with local teams and see if they can help you out.

[Joohoo]

first thing you should look at is if it runs on ac or dc. If dc then look at it runs on 12v dc.
If this is true then some thing you should do is hook it up to an oscilloscope to make sure they dont use any encoded signal ( doesn't make sense to do so but some times companies do weird things).

If it is jnot an encoded signal and just an "on and off" signal. Then make sure that the signal voltage is below i bielieve it is 5 volts.

If all of these are correct then you can use them. just wire them up to a conventional "pwm" connector and there you go.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Before you go too much further...
<R02> ROBOT parts shall not be made from hazardous materials, be unsafe, or cause an unsafe
condition. Items specifically PROHIBITED from use on the ROBOT include:

D. Lasers of any type

[PhilBot]

Most trip sensors don't use lasers. It's really overkill, and would make installation and alignment very difficult. Most are simple IR led emitters with some sort of modulation to screen out background noise.

[landon2345]

I have not been able to locate banner sensors which operate as a trip wire type. All of the garage door sensors that I have come across have two wires laminated together with one having a solid black line running on the side. Im guessing that these are positive and negative wires but they could just as easily be one signal and one AC I suppose. But we need DC. Im also welcome to getting a cheaper sensor as garage sensors run at about $40 a set. Any help would be appreciated!

[Jim E]

Try a search on optical switches. Perhaps that will turn up some other alternatives other than garage door switches. They may require some additional circuitry in order to make them work. 30 cm is a long distance for IR switches. The cone of transmission will be pretty wide at that wavelength. Expect some false positives with the ball construction. Look for those that operate in the 5-12V DC range.