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24 posts tagged with "sensor"

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Distance Measurement With MaxBotix Ultrasonic Sensor

Distance measurement using ultrasonic sensors is an essential feature of many industrial automation applications requiring level measurement, object detection and counting, proximity sensing, distance measurement, dimension measurement, and much more. This guide walks you through the hardware setup and AppBlocks visual programming to build a fully functional distance meter using a MaxBotix ultrasonic sensor.

Smart Plants

As we all know, two things are absolutely necessary to keep plants alive: water and light. This article is short, but feel free to jump straight to the demo.

We want to create a system that can autonomously keep our green friends alive, and as such, we require the following features:

These two features are the bare minimum for a smart indoor farming solution, but many other capabilities can be added to the system, such as:

Break-Beam Sensor Counter

We got a mini-golf for the office, which meant we had to find a way to keep track of how many times we actually scored.

Hardware​

Sensors​

There are several ways a system can detect the presence of an object (a rolling ball, a box on a conveyor belt, assembly line counting, inventory management, intruder detection...).

  1. Break-beam sensors have two ends, an emitter and a transmitter. The emitter sends out a beam of invisible infrared light and the receiver tells the device (in our case a TPS using Tibbit #00_1) if the light can be received or not. One drawback with IR sensors is that they can be affected by sunlight, but since we will only use the mini-golf indoors, that's not a problem. Other IR-based sensors can also detect proximity, but that's not required for our application.
  2. Sonar sensors could also be used (check here and here) but the break beam sensor is cheaper, faster, and smaller, making it more suitable for this application. Sonar sensors give the distance between the object and the sensor, which is also not required by this application.
  3. Ambient light sensors output a signal proportional to the intensity of received light. In theory, we could use one by placing it at floor level, pointing up, on the expected path of the ball, but the install process is too hands on, and the sensor readings could be very easily impacted by debris collected by the sensor.
  4. Pressure pads also a very valid alternative, although that would require more testing and callibration, as well as more physical modifications to the mini-golf track.

Remote Relay with AppBlocks Cloud

This project demonstrates how the TPS can be used to reboot a computer remotely.

The idea is to leverage the TPS to control the reboot or power pins in a computer to allow the user of the main computer (the target machine) to reboot the machine remotely.

Modbus Scan

This utility project scans the range of possible modbus sensor ids and prints out the ids of the sensors that respond to the query. The project is useful for identifying the modbus id of a sensor.