Choice of pico board

Which product is right for your exact requirements
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John Wood
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Joined: Fri May 13, 2005 3:07 pm

Choice of pico board

Post by John Wood »

Hi,

We wish to measue the time interval between products passing along a conveyor. We have a sensor that goes low when the product is present (about 0.1s) and which will go high once the product has passed until the next product arrives (varies between 0.15s and 0.8s). Once the reading is made, we wish to store the result in a file (maybe Excel) so that we can analyse it later. We wish to record about 10 minutes of data at a time (less than 1000 readings). The resolution on the time interval we need is about one hundreth of a second (0.01s).

Ideally we would like a board that plugs into the usb on the laptop.

What Pico board should be use? What software will we require?


Thanks,


John Wood
John Wood
Megadale Ltd

Sarah

Post by Sarah »

Hi

Thank you for your post.

As you are looking for a USB data logger I would suggest that our USB ADC-11 may be ideal for your needs. It will enable you to sample for the length of time you require, at the speed that you require. It logs analogue voltage between 0 to 2.5V and will enable you to see the results as either a graph or spreadsheet. You can also export the results into Excel. It would not however calculate the ontervals for you - it will just show you when the voltage was high or low. You can see more about the ADC-11 at:

http://www.picotech.com/data-acquisition.html

The software you would need is Picolog and this is supplied free with the unit.

Hope this helps

Best Regards

John Wood
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Joined: Fri May 13, 2005 3:07 pm

External Trigger

Post by John Wood »

Sarah,

Thank you for your reply. That will work ok. However, we will get up 800 readings per product based on a sample rate of 0.01s. It would be better if we could take our sample reading based on an external trigger rather than a fixed interval of 0.01s. Thus we would get one time stamp and one voltage reading every time the product is present.

Do you have anything like that?


Thanks,

John
John Wood
Megadale Ltd

Sarah

Post by Sarah »

Hi

Thank you for your post.

That is a limitation of the software rather than the hardware. Therefore I would still recommend the ADC-11. Picolog will enable you to start on trigger but from that point on it will just run.

The only way you could get round this would be to use Picoscope. You can use this with the ADC-11. With this software you could set a repeat trigger and trigger off of a seperate channel. You would then need to set the software to "Save on Trigger" and it would save each waveform. This would however save them as traces and not as the sample values - you would need to convert them to text for that.

Hope this helps

Best Regards

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