Experimenting with Vibration Sensors - Machinery Safety Blog #9 (More photos)

Hello Element14 community,

Sorry for so many blog updates on my challenge. I know we only need to do 2, but I'm so into it that I want to share the experience.

To follow-up on yesterdays blog, I am posting photos of the process:

Start-up:

Choose which program

A - Machinery Safety

or

B - Test Sensor

If "A" is chosen: (Set-up with push buttons)

     Starts the "Machinery Safety program".

     - First you are asked to enter the maximum percent above average vibration allowable.

          -This is done by pressing push button "C" until your % limit is correct.

          - If you make an error in your %, there is a "reset" to 0 button, "B".

          - When your limit is correct you press the "enter" push button, "A". (As you can see I use these buttons for multiple purposes).

I set the Max above average at 6%

The calibration starts (16 vibration checks in 10 seconds)

       - The program then takes the sum of the 16 checks and divides it by 16 to get the average.

It now takes your % limit to get the shutdown limit.

       - Average + 6%

       - The Shut Down Limit (SDL) is 543.

        - All information is displayed on the LCD.

          - CAL= "Calibrated average"

          - CR= "Current vibration read"

          - HR= "Highest recorded vibration"

          - SDL= "Shut down limit"

When the Vibration Sensor reads vibrations at or above this limit, it shuts down the machine.

Displays Shut Down Limit & the Maximum reading that caused the shutdown

The reset button must be pressed to continue.

That was the steps taken from start to shutdown. I found that the information displayed on the LCD was very useful information. When I set it up for my CNC I used 6% over calibrated average. When I used 5% it shut down when the x-axis moved and 7% wouldn't shut it down when over-travel happened. The thing I found is that the KEMET sensor is so sensitive that it took me a bit of time to be able to estimate the shut down % required.

Like I said in my previous blog, I won't stop testing this sensor. It is so amazing, KEMET did an incredible job!!

As a side note:

This was a comment made on dougw Blog The Saga of Kemet Tokin by Andrew J . I borrowed one of my parrots feathers and dropped it on the sensor. The result was, the sensor was calibrated at 514 and when the feather landed on the sensor, the readout went to 515. Not much of a change, but the sensor did register it.

Thank you for reading!!

Dale Winhold