• Project: Factory Floor Sensors

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18 February 2015 by 

While at Warwick Manufacturing Group, I helped out on a project to produce sensors for factory floor machinery. The aim of the project was to fit sensors that could monitor different states of each machine so the business could access statistics such as downtime, output, etc. In the end, after much research and development, we produced two different robust sensors; one for a hole punching machine and one for an arc-welding robot. The data measured by these devices was wirelessly transmitted to a Raspberry Pi situated in the adjacent office. The Raspberry Pi then stored and analysed that data making it available to the business.

As the environment was particularly noisy signal wise, we had to be very careful with transmitted data to make sure it was correct. As a result, error detection and correction was implemented into the wireless protocol to avoid bad data. In the end, the sensors worked very well and did the job the company tasked us with. The middle photo below shows me calibrating the distance sensor on the hole punching machine. The picture on the right shows myself and one of the other workers with the finished product.

As the Raspberry Pi was run in headless mode this project mainly improved my Linux Terminal and networking skills.