I am building a monitor that will, at minimum, detect when a soybean seed has passed by a sensor that will be located on a vertical plastic "seed tube". The dimensions on the seed tube is 3/4" x 1 1/4" rectangular. The drop distance is approx 16" and the sensor will be located 8" from drop point. The rate of drop will be approx 6 seeds/second or every 167 ms.
I am currently testing with IR.
There seem to be too much "dead area" where the seed can drop and not be detected. When the seed breaks its path it is plenty responsive and works well.
I am curious to know if a phototransistor, photocell or other possible solution exists.
I did read about the possibility of wiring up 2 IR receivers in series to span a larger area and reduce the "dead area", plausible solution? If so would one emitter and 2 receivers work together?
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On the topic of photoresistor, that could be an option. You'll need a 10K resistor for pull down I would assume. You'd have to make sure that the seed would guarantee to pass in front of the sensor. You could start by finding a set light value for the light when this seed is not passing.
to be honest, for your question, I don't know how to solve it, but I can recommend some online shops about electronic components, you can turn to them for help, such as jotrin, it offers all kinds of electronic components and solutions or veswin, you can buy what you want from it
That is exactly what I have done is I have made a physical replication of the setup and wired up an IR sensor to a breadboard with the proper hardware and have a baseline for my IR. That is how i have deteremined that there are deadspots in the seed tube.
Does anyone know if I can hook 2 IR recievers up in series with one emitter?