Taking a Walk on the Wild EV Side – A Supplier’s Observation of Tesla Motors

If you’ve ever visited Greenfield Village or the Henry Ford museum, it’s easy to mentally thrust yourself back in time, as you stand in the midst of the carefully preserved yet functional, living artifacts that exist in this jewel of a living museum in the middle of busy Dearborn, Michigan.  It’s quite easy to imagine what early pioneers like Karl Benz, Ransom Olds, and Henry Ford experienced as they tinkered with the internal combustion engine or toyed with the idea of automated assembly.  It’s a little harder to imagine how these people fought through and endured the negativity created by those who didn’t share the vision.

Those early “car people”  had the intestinal fortitude to resist staying in the grips of a transportation paradigm involving the horse and buggy, to fight the status quo and to stand fast to their beliefs that hydrocarbon powered vehicles would replace animals pulling wagons as the prime mode of transportation.  They did this in the face of the naysayers, extraordinary resistance from the media, and in general, people who wished them ill-fated ventures.  It’s safer to throw stones at people who try new and different ways of doing things; just to be safe and just to be “right”.

Is it much different today with those change agents who pioneer new ideas in technologies?   With a wobbly economy and people still worried about having a job in a shaky election year, it becomes easier to just stay in where it’s warm and fuzzy.  $500 million flubs like Solyndra, a flood of PV chips on the market, and global alternative energy competition in all forms make it easy to take the low route or throw stones. It also makes for a gray, grumpy, pessimistic outlook.

To Avoid Trouble Later, Consider Your Application Conditions Up Front

Hardly a day passes by where we are not contacted by a desperate end-user or equipment manufacturer seeking assistance with a situation of sensors failing at an unacceptably high rate.  Once we get down to the root cause of the failures, in almost every case it’s a situation where the specific sensors are being applied in a manner which all but guarantees premature failure.

Not all sensors are created equal.  Some are intentionally designed for light-duty applications where the emphasis is more on economical cost rather than the ability to survive in rough service conditions.  Other sensors are specifically designed to meet particular challenges of the application environment and as a result may carry a higher initial price.

Some things to think about when choosing a sensor for a new application:

Survey Says: “UHF RFID works”

To give you an idea of where I’m going to take this, let me ask a few simple questions. Would you buy a mattress without laying down on it to see if it’s comfortable? What about a motor cycle or car? Would you buy one without a test drive? In that same vain, would you want your company to invest in UHF (ultra-high frequency) RFID (radio frequency identification) equipment for a RFID project without anything more than specs if you didn’t have to? I would assume the answers are: “of course not”.

Ingress Protection for Industrial Sensors

As has been discussed previously, industrial sensors must be able to withstand some pretty punishing conditions.  Although industrial sensors incorporate some of the same high-end technology found in, say, the blu-ray disc player in your home theater system, it’s not likely that your BD player is going to be subjected to punishing shock, vibration, and general abuse as do the sensors in your industrial machinery.  To be sure, your blu-ray player doesn’t need to be protected against hydraulic fluid or moisture ingress.  Which brings me to the topic of this entry:  Ingress protection for industrial sensors.

In order to be viable in typical industrial environments, industrial sensors must often be able to tolerate getting wet, sometimes really, really wet.  Fortunately, most sensors do indeed incorporate some degree of ingress protection by design.  And it’s pretty easy to choose the proper sensor for a particular set of expected conditions thanks to a method of rating method outlined under international standard IEC 60529.  This standard takes the somewhat vague term “waterproof” and provides specific details as to just how waterproof an electronic device is.

An IP (Ingress Protection) rating for an electronic device typically consists of the letters IP, followed by a two-digit number.  The first digit identifies the protection against intrusion of solid objects (dirt, hand tools, your fingers, etc.):

Back to the Basics – What Makes Background Suppression Sensors Capable of Solving Difficult Applications?

Diffuse photoelectric sensors have been and are used to successfully solve numerous applications in automation.  However, there are some applications that are too difficult or impossible to solve with standard diffuse sensors.  In some cases, these difficult applications can be solved with a background suppression sensor that is also based on the diffuse operation principal.  So the question is then raised, what makes the background suppression sensor capable of solving these difficult applications?

 This may be a good time to review…  Diffuse sensors operate on the principal that when a light source is shined on a surface, the light is scattered or diffused in many directions. A small portion of the light is reflected back to the sensor receiver. The receiver used in this style of sensor is designed to be sensitive to a smaller or larger amount of light, depending on the sensor configuration, that is reflected back from the target surface.  There are a number of factors that affect how well diffuse sensors operate including, but not limited to, surface finish, color, texture or surface irregularities, target size, dirty or dusty environment and the background of the application.

Background sensors, sometimes referred to as BGS, actually have two receivers built into the sensor.  These two receivers detect the angle of the light reflected back from the target, referred to as triangulation.  If the target is between the focal point and the receiver the light is reflected to one receiver and if the target is beyond the focal point the light is reflected to the second receiver.  The sensor compares the amount of light on each receiver and sets the output accordingly.