[ENGINEERING] Home + Buckle/Viewer Sensor Wiring

[Greg Ercolano]

The OPCS website has had docs for a while now on how to custom wire the Home and Buckle/Viewer sensors directly to the IBM PC parallel port.

Because there's at least 3 customers at present wiring up their own printers, and all are outside the Los Angeles area, I've been trying to update the docs to make it easier for people to wire things up themselves.

First, I've updated these two web pages with some added details:

Home Sensor Wiring
http://seriss.com/opcs/install/omron.html

Buckle/Viewer Sensor Wiring
http://seriss.com/opcs/install/buckview.html

As an alternative to the above "custom wiring" techniques, there's also the optional Parallel Port Interface Board which I designed back in 2010 or so, which makes it easier/cleaner to wire up sensors to the parallel port using off the shelf RJ-45 patch cables between the sensors and the board, and a DB-25 cable between the computer and the board.

This also makes it easy to add new sensors or move around sensors from one port to another just by plugging/unplugging RJ-45 connectors. In the following case, the customer used two boards because they needed 6 input sensors total including an optional capping shutter for YCM shooting and filter wheel. Since the max inputs per board is 5, to get 6 the second board was needed, and as well two parallel ports in the IBM PC, one for each board:

 These board can be mounted inside the printer, as shown in this photo:

Those boards are revision 3, or "REV 3".
I've been working on a newer/cheaper version of these boards which will be called "PIO-100", and is a "REV 6".

It has some benefits over the older boards in that they operate on a single 12V supply, and each board supports
3 tension motor outputs instead of just 2, enough to control an aerial head printer with a single board. It also
offers option jumpers to allow either NPN or PNP style home sensor inputs (i.e. EE-SX670 or EE-SX670P)

The new boards will look something like this mockup (made in photoshop):

The schematic is somewhat similar to the old board, and should be pin compatible in terms of wiring of the RJ-45
connectors, allowing one to swap the new boards in place of the old if needed.

When I have more information about these new boards, I'll follow up on the group here. Currently these "REV 6" boards
are still in development, but I expect they'll be ready for purchase some time in either March or April 2021.

[Greg Ercolano]

On 2/7/21 1:53 PM, Greg Ercolano wrote:

[..]

I've been working on a newer/cheaper version of these boards which will be called "PIO-100", and is a "REV 6".

It has some benefits over the older boards in that they operate on a single 12V supply, and each board supports
3 tension motor outputs instead of just 2, enough to control an aerial head printer with a single board. It also
offers option jumpers to allow either NPN or PNP style home sensor inputs (i.e. EE-SX670 or EE-SX670P)

The new boards will look something like this mockup (made in photoshop):

When I have more information about these new boards, I'll follow up on the group here. Currently these "REV 6" boards

are still in development, but I expect they'll be ready for purchase some time in either March or April 2021.

    Just following up on this item; I got the boards back from the PCB printing house, wired them up and they work great.

    Here's the actual boards printed and soldered up with components. Came out looking just like the above photoshop mockup:

I might do a REV-6A; the output ports "8" and "9" unintentionally have their outputs on a different conductor,
and I noticed some of the documentation printed on the board needs some minor corrections (fixable with a sticker),
but otherwise tested fine with both NPN and PNP home sensors.

The default/recommended type of sensors are NPN home sensors, like the EE-SX670 and EE-SX671.
The PNP sensors, like the EE-SX670P and EE-SX671P, can be used by changing the appropriate jumpers.

Also tested control of Crydom relays for tension motors; works fine.