I now remember more. They took away my plant/office printer. It was no longer
supported but it was needed. This made more than a bit of trouble for me. I
had to print the PLC's output into a file in the new lap top. The D connector
on the lap top became a printer emulator. I needed to stop the PLC when the
lab top's buffer was full. The Basic program sent a back a series of 1111 that
went through my detector and then back to the CTS pin on the lap top. This
stopped the PLC when the lap tops buffer was full. A print file was then built
by the Basic program within the lab top. I could then output the lab top's
print file through the LAN system and onto the new office printer. They did
not like it when I tied up (the only legal) office printer with 800 pages of
ladder logic. No one cared. They sold the plant and got rid of me. I moved
on.
-----Original Message-----
From: fznidarsic <fznidar...@aol.com>
To: vortex-l <vortex-l@eskimo.com>
Sent: Fri, Feb 28, 2014 9:09 am
Subject: Re: [Vo]:Plastic detector find
Thank you Alan G.
How? I really want to do this. I am lacking in my knowledge of digital
signal processing. What software? Once I process the signal how do I get a 1
or 0 out of my old computer? I used to know how to get out a one with C and
Basic. How do I get the two software packages talking?
I am about ready to turn the detector over to Howard for testing. #5 plastic
is straws and bottle caps. They either colored or to small to be detected. I
just wanted to do better.
I used to do something like this with the 9 pin D connectors on yesterday's
computers. I needed a way to stop a serial line printer upon buffer full at my
old job in 1995. It was an odd situation with some old but critical PLC's that
needed to print to a new serial printer. The system worked fine until the
office management installed a LAN printer and took away my old computer and
printer. It was a long story the old computer was no longer supported, they
said. I objected. We will get rid of the computer when we upgrade the PLC's,
I said. It was not an office computer or printer. I was overridden and mad
about it. All of the PLC software was on floppies. I transferred the software
and wrote a C program to print out the ladder logic. It's been a while and I
don't remember all of the details.
I was too busy for this but now I had to do something. The Basic program could
transmit an ASKI character with all zeros. I don't remember what character
this was anymore. This resulted in a zero followed by a string of ones on the
output line. It looked something like this 01111111. The ones made a long
pulse. The signal did not return to zero between the ones. I filtered the
pulse with a resistor and a capacitor. The zero reset the capacitor through a
signal diode. The string of all ones produced a high voltage in a detector and
turned on an output. This output- was sent to the CTS pin. I could send the
string of ASKI characters to the 9 pin D's output with C or Basic. I don't
know if I can do this with a USB connector. Perhaps that needs to be my next
product. A USB to single digital output.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: AlanG <a...@magicsound.us>
To: vortex-l <vortex-l@eskimo.com>
Sent: Thu, Feb 27, 2014 6:09 pm
Subject: Re: [Vo]:Plastic detector find
On 2/27/2014 10:17 AM, fznidar...@aol.com wrote:
#5 Plastic lets the light through in colors.
Use a cheap camera sensor and look at the color counts. Assuming the
light source is broad-spectrum, the #5 image should have a pretty high
range of color delta compared to the others.
AlanG
"It's only software..."
