Lane Brain Order of Finish unit

Commercial timing systems
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Doug-in-the-woods
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Lane Brain Order of Finish unit

Post by Doug-in-the-woods »

Currently have a Lane Brain unit but it will false trigger or give erroneous results at time.
Planning on putting IR emitters in track and IR doctors in bridge.
My question is do I need to pulse the emitters?
can I just change out the photo diodes w/ IR emitter leds?
anyone else have similar problems w/ Lane Brain??
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Stan Pope
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Re: Lane Brain Order of Finish unit

Post by Stan Pope »

Ought to be able to swap 'em in, rerouting wiring as needed if you are inverting sender / receiver locations. May have to juggle resister values.

Better yet, track down the cause of current malfunction. Identify common environmental factors surrounding failure. Duplicate failure if possible ... then you will be able to tell if you have fixed it!

Some likely causes:
1. loose alignment of sender/receiver units.
2. insufficient filtering of external signals... add bypass capacitors at strategic points. (a 0.001 mfd disc ceramic capacitor from wire to chassis where each wire enters the control box would be the cure.) With so many more sources of radio frequency emissions, I'm surprised there are not more problems.
3. dying filtering that is supposed to be isolating sections of the circuit.
4. changing ambient light, flash photography, etc.

Of these, swapping in IR's might fix #4, but none of the other potential causes!
Stan
"If it's not for the boys, it's for the birds!"
SuperDave

Re: Lane Brain Order of Finish unit

Post by SuperDave »

If you switch to pulsed IR there are at least two considerations.
1. The pulse must be significantly faster than the desired time resolution. Thus at least 4 kHz for .001 seconds and at least 40 kHz for .0001 resolution.
2. The consistency of the detector which is after all finding missing pulses must be at least as good and preferably much better than the desired resolution.
Commonly available commercial sensor systems used primarily in industrial counting applications usually don't even specify let alone meet these requirements.
Doug-in-the-woods
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Re: Lane Brain Order of Finish unit

Post by Doug-in-the-woods »

I sent the LaNRE bRAIN IN AND THEY SENT ME 3 NEW DECTORS.
i PLACED NEW PURPLE DECTORS BEHIND THE TIMER DECTORS AND THE hALOGEN BULBS WORK JUST FINE AT 8" HEIGHT OR IS IT (oups caps on, sorry)7 inches. need to remeasure.
Can detect an ice pick waving over the lamps.
And the start gates now have the option of both operating together reguardless who pushes what button and they can operate indepently as well.
I read all the ideas presented here and instituted all.
Well it's crubch time, BIG race is tomorrow Saturday June 30th.
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