We are using the 2011 Retro-reflective Sensors this year to sense our wheel rotations. We spent a lot of time debugging them and we have determined that if our voltage drops below 10 volts, the sensors will bugg-out and add in extra counts. We temporarily fixed this problem by wiring the power from these senors to the 24 volt power supply on the board. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to supply a better voltage to these sensors without using the 24 volt hookups from the PD board?
You can run the same cRIO 24V from the PDB to a Solenoid Bumper on your cRIO, and then power your sensors from the Solenoid Bumper. You would “turn on a solenoid” and it would supply 24V to your sensor.
What Mr. Lim said. This is a GDC sanctified method of powering those sensors.
If you can’t do that for some reason, you might try to find yourself a 12V to 24V DC-DC converter. Just check the specs on it and make sure it’s good down to 7V or so, or you’ll just blackout your converter and then your sensors.