Hi, Im trying to find a suitable sensor to count bottles as they pass on a conveyor. I want to connect it to an RPi, with PiFace. Any help would be appreciated.
Hi, Im trying to find a suitable sensor to count bottles as they pass on a conveyor. I want to connect it to an RPi, with PiFace. Any help would be appreciated.
What kind of bottles?
Metal or plastic tops?
They would be plastic (HDPE) bottles and also plastic caps.
If the bottles are neatly inline you could possibly detect them using a module like this above the caps:
https://www.bananarobotics.com/shop/Pololu-38-kHz-IR-Infrared-Proximity-Sensor-with-30cm-Range
Another approach could be beam-break with modules such as these:
https://www.adafruit.com/products/2167
Though I'm not sure how transparency of the bottles might affect these. Worth a try though 
Thanks Paul, that looks like it should do what I want! I'm guessing that it is compatible with the Raspberry Pi
Yes. They should be compatible with the PiFace.
ST recently came out with their flight sence sensor that measures distance (to 50 cm) pretty accurately and they are decently priced as well. That would be an easy way to use a beam breaker but with only needing to position one sensor, it uses I2C.
Kas
Thanks Paul & Kas, that's given me something to work with. Do either of you know of any good resources in terms of software to use them with? I'm pretty new to using an RPi for this kind of application, so it's quite a steep learning curve for me.
Cheers
Personally I have never used a RPi as I feel for almost anything i do it's over kill. If it is a simple project why not use Arduino (not that I have used that much either). Other options are TI Launchpads, Freescale Frdm Boards or even ST Nucleo Boards that comes with a free Keil License for the ARM M0. The ST option would allow you to get the X-NUCLEO-6180XA1 that had the flightsense on the board already. I belive the later two boards can be programed in mbed and the first board can be done in Energia, which is like arduino but for TI boards, all teh boards can be programed in C. I hope that helps a bit.
Kas
What kind of count output are you looking for?
LCD? Serial?