Im looking for a sensor that will detect the movement of feed grain moving ontop of a flat chain. Corn feed is stored in a small hopper and exits onto flat chain which travels along a loop to feed chickens each morning. I need a sensor that will detect when the feed stops moving. Sometimes the flat chain will break, stopping feed from traveling along the loop.
If the chain stops moving, the amount of feed inside the hopper wont be able to put out all the amount of food for the chickens each morning. Without actually going into the chicken house to look at the moving feed along the chain, I cannot tell if the chain stops.
Hi M,
Welcome to the forums. What an interesting project, there are a few options I can think of here. Some images of the chain and what operates it would also be great to help narrow down a solution.
Depending on the material and the speed of the chain you could use an inductive coil to output a voltage you could measure. If this drops to 0V the chain has stopped moving. This is similar to how metal detectors work.
You could use a roll the chain over a limit switch and if a significant amount of time passes where its state doesn’t change trigger some sort of alarm/notification. You could do something similar with a distance sensor but this may need some finer tuning.
There are options using cameras and checking manually/with machine vision, but there is also going to be a simpler option.
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What about some painting some shiny coloured bands on the chain and then using a colour sensor to capture the painted bands.
You can have something, maybe a micro-controller, with an inbuilt countdown timer. It will alert you if the timer ever reaches zero. However it is constantly being reset by the colour sensor which triggers every time it detects one of the coloured bands moving past.
The alternating colors can ensure you’re not detecting the same band twice (e.g. if the chain gets stuck such that a band is right above a sensor). If you just saw Red, more red does nothing, the next one has to be blue to reset.
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I also like this idea. The hard thing about not having constraints yet is there are many many possibilities.
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How about a WiFi camera setup so you can view the chain area.
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i thought about that but i would need a minimum of 2 cameras per chicken house. tthere are 2 houses next to each other and im not sure if 4 total would interfere with eachother.
how do i upload cell phone video i tried but there was a list of different formats here and i couldn’t upload them
I think i might have a simple idea i just thought of. back in the 80’s I repaired camcorders and VCR’s. They used reel and take up sensors for the tape counter and loading deck positions. they used a hub reel with foil and black squares with a diode sensing on and off times which was sent to the micro.
i could mount that type of sensor onto a small rubber tire with a spring tension onto the feed chain, as the chain moves the reel sensor would send pulses to a led circuit showing led on when the tire is moving and off when the tire stops.
its more mechanical over using something like a motion sensing circuit. thats just a thought for now
what do you guys think
I think the simpler you keep it the more reliable it will be.
Cheers Bob
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Hi M
Possibly the simplest circuit (instead of detecting changing pulses) would be to couple a small hobby DC motor used as a generator to the belt. Connect the DC output to the AC points of a bridge rectifier then there will be a DC output at the + and - rectifier output irrespective of motor direction. The actual output would depend on motor voltage but you first have to overcome 2 diode drops which could be 1.4V unless you make up your own bridge with schottky diodes with a smaller forward voltage drop. The bridge is required if the belt is reversible. If only one direction it should not be required unless there is a possibility of reversing direction.
This circuit is often used in interlock systems to detect motor movement and prevent any reversing action until a motor actually stops.
Cheers Bob
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