Network Switch

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by baumgartensam

As a general rule, I definitely agree and we avoid it when we can.

Their are a few reasons why we chose to put processors on moving parts. The moving ones are on our elevator carriages. We are using them to get the absolute position of the elevator. The frame of our elevator has an overlay on it that has a gray code binary system encoded on it. We are then using reflective photo interrupters to read the encoded binary. We are encoding 10 bit numbers meaning we need 10 photo interrupters, each with 4 wires (2 for LED, 2 for photo diode). Rather than running 40 wires to our belly pan and doing the decoding there, we are using an arduino to convert the data into a decimal number on the carriage then sending that to our main controller.

We decided it was better to put the processor on the carriage and have a communication cable running through our cable carrier than to run 40 cables and put the processor on the belly pan.

Wow, that certainly sounds like a complex feedback setup!. Have you considered other options that may be simpler? For example, if your elevator is powered on a winch, you could hook up a potentiometer to the winch and use it to measure the location of the elevator. We did something similar a few years back with a winch and a 10-turn pot, and it worked perfectly the entire season.