Electronic Systems Group

Post your progress reports in the form of a reply to this Topic.

Here's the datasheet for the inductive proximity sensor used for the homing circuit on the stepper motor drive:
Some links about barcodes and the Raspberri Pi.

Link 1, simple program

Link 2, simple program

Link 3, more stuff.

Not sure where my first post went, but here's the second one.
This was our second class this week, on April 24.
Today, Vinny installed Panduit on the backpanel, which made the wiring look very organized and nice. A front panel was then mounted along with a makeshift belt tensioner that worked well. We measured the ice cube dimensions at 1.25" x 1.375". Rob tried to program and understand how to get a program a motion block in the PLC logic for the 850, to no avail. I tried to research and look for additional sample code or pointers online, to which I did not find much.

Today, more good progress was made. Vinnie had installed output relays overnight.
Most importantly Rob with Dave's help got the Motion Block working figured out. Now we need to program relative motion and figure out the assigned positions that will be needed for the cup positions. Ricky and Michelle have the robot pretty much ready to as soon as we have the relative positions we need.
We collected a list of the the I/Os so that we can start writing the program for how the system will flow as a whole. Troubleshooting was needed for some time to figure out how to get the homing sensor wired correctly.

Here is the excel file for the micro850 inputs and outputs..

Word document.. might help
Copy of the motion block working, Power up instruction with reset, Homing instruction, and move relative instruction.

A couple of us came in on the off-day, Thusday night to play with Raspberry Pi and get a barcode scanner working.
It was interesting to see and learn about what this little compute is and what it is capable of, how it is its own computer with it's own operating system and applications. We cannibalized an online program that compared two scanner imputs and decided if they matched. The intention was to get this working and then modify it into our desired feature of comparing a scan to a stored value in a database. However, it was challenging enough getting the program to run without a deeper knowledge of linux, not too mention, it was unclear why the 'canned/borrowed' program was failing. I was not convinced either that we had the unit physically wired and operating correctly since the voltage readings were not as expected in certain places. So software and possible wiring issue. Hopefully some progress was made over the weekend. It was fun playing with this little thing, but it would have been nice to see it working on this night.

continued working on the barcode scanner using the Raspberri Pi. Also working on the card scanner, wired up the circuit for that and is functioning as should.

*discovered there are some issues with the IR sensor we were trying to use for the card scanner so opted to switch it up and make use of different sensor