Connect a sensor to pc directly

Community General Discussion
1

Hello everyone,
I search à solution to connect a sensor (encoder, type: RT3806-AB -400V) to the PC without using Arduino or other card, it's possible to do that? If that is possible what is the best way to achieve this goal?
Thanks you for your help

2

the only one solution is parallel printer port

3

Old school!

I recall back in the days of VB3 (I think?) having to hunt down a driver to access the port- I had a couple of steppers running with pulses on the printer port's individual pins.

4

You can also use the Serial port provided on most full tower computer.

Follow that tutorial :

https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~drayside/altinput/

You will need to write a software running on the computer to interpret the data. It might also not be fast enough, depending of your needs.

5

Nowadays, the parallel printer port is not commun .
I was thninking about virtual emulator for exemple, I'dont know if that can take serial port data directly from sensor?!
Until yet I don't found any information about that

6

thank you all for your quick response,

I will try that

The problem, I need to have a fast data acquisition by this way

7

Arduino is an example of Wiring from the book Processing and Wiring.

Firmata is a system to read/operate sensors and motiles through Arduino boards.
There may be people using it but it was abandoned years ago.

If you use a duino with USB, you can control the mouse, keys and 6 stick axes in USB HID mode.

The free PC language; Processing (of Wiring and Processing) that Arduino emulates has a serial library that lets Processing talk COM with Arduino boards in default USB CDC mode.

Python will let you talk COM too.

8

Hi
@GoForSmoke

I'm not sur to undrestand what do you like to say, but my goal isn't used the arduino board or other one, But juste have the data caming from my sensor to the PC dircetly without board card.
Thanks

9

The short answer is No. What do you want to do with the encoder data once you have it on your PC?

10

What will you do with the data? Log it with timestamps? Process? React?

All of these you may be able to do with -a- Duino, if needed, a Franken-duino.

Still available (the 4.1 is out of stock) PJRC's Teensy 4.0 (no pins, you solder )

  • ARM Cortex-M7 at 600 MHz
  • Float point math unit, 64 & 32 bits
  • 1984K Flash, 1024K RAM (512K tightly coupled), 1K EEPROM (emulated)
  • USB device 480 Mbit/sec & USB host 480 Mbit/sec
  • 40 digital input/output pins, 31 PWM output pins
  • 14 analog input pins
  • 7 serial, 3 SPI, 3 I2C ports
  • 2 I2S/TDM and 1 S/PDIF digital audio port
  • 3 CAN Bus (1 with CAN FD)
  • 32 general purpose DMA channels
  • Cryptographic Acceleration & Random Number Generator
  • RTC for date/time
  • Programmable FlexIO
  • Pixel Processing Pipeline
  • Peripheral cross triggering
  • Power On/Off management

Or maybe get by with a Low Cost (less than $12 without pins).
This is beyond AVR-duinos but has weaker by far pins. Not beginner friendly at all.
Teensy LC with pins is in stock.

ARM Cortex-M0+ processor at 48 MHz, 62K Flash, 8K RAM, 12 bit analog input & output, hardware Serial, SPI & I2C, USB, and a total of 27 I/O pins.

11

PC's generally aren't used for real time control because the PC's internal clock only runs at 18.2 Hz:

Original PC hardware clock chain:
3.58MHz [color TV "burst" crystal freq - cheapest xtal source when PC was designed]
x 4/3 [prescaler, gives 4.77Mhz original PC clock speed]
/ 65536 [8253 timer max 16 bit divisor]
/ 4 [flip flop prescaler]
= 18.2 Hz or ~55mS

Is too slow for fast data collection. And that is best case, running single threaded DOS. Windows doesn't guarantee service times and so you'll have lots of jitter in your data.

As crazy as it sounds, no matter WHAT speed you CPU clock is, THIS has NEVER, EVER changed since the original PC was designed.

12

Hello
I would to save the data caming from the sensor in the binary or CSV file.

13

Yes, I would like to save this data coming from the sensor with timestamps in the binary or CSV file.

Thanks for this suggestion, I will study that, if I understand the previous discussion, there is no way to connect the sensor without a board card

I tried this option, but it is not possible to install the program in the Win 10, but the idea is good.
If a personn master programming can get results with this idea described in your article

ok that's a problem, I think i"s better to use duino for this case

14

your encoder is not a sensor.
anyway you can take a (Micro) SD Card Module and a RTC Module and store your data to file.
This requires no additional invents and/or programming language knowledge.
The file can be simple read on PC.

15

US Digital may have what you need.

16

Get an IO bus card with ports to match your sensors for your PC.
Then find out that your OS only watches that card some of every second.

17

Is why you never see Windoze running hospital equipment. Data terminals, yes, life dependent equipment, no.

18

Gotta be careful with that statement. I've shipped two medical devices that ran on various flavors of Windows and I know there are many more out in the industry.

19

Was it a cardiac shock unit? Monitoring equipment yes, but if a life depends on it ... what were you shipping with windoze on it?

20

But shirley not in a real time, got to have a have a timely response application ?

As we all know windowze (all versions) can and does just pause sometimes ..........