Does any know of a simple photo eye arrangement that will count parts as they pass and feed this directly into a PC? I don't want to go with soft controls or anything like that; just want to hook a P/E directly to a PC so that we can count pieces with our own app.

Thanks.

 

Try the game port. The button lines should be usable with a sensor whose output works down to 5 volts. And you simply read a known memory location.

Regards

cww

 

I can't recommend a specific sensor as I don't know your application. You would have to talk to a local distributor about your application to see what would work best (there are dozens of different kinds).

To hook it up to the PC, you could use a small I/O block connected to the PC via Ethernet. You would then just poll that I/O to see the state of the sensor. If the parts go past too fast for direct polling to work, some of these I/O blocks have counters built in which you could read. You can buy these from Advantech, Acromag, etc., or you can look at what your usual automation vendor has to offer.

If this is actually a student project with no budget, rather than a real industrial project, then you would have to let us know so we can make some other recommendation.