Break Beam Sensor with a USB interface

[SaxyTimmy]

Hello,

I am attempting to build a control system including foul line detectors for a bowling alley. I am a Computer Engineering student, and while I am really good at the software side of things am a bit lacking in the hardware side. I was wondering if I could get any help in creating this.

I have been doing some research into this and am not sure about the suitability of IR since there may be many in the same alley in approximately the same location. This means that maybe some of the light would overflow into the next sensor requiring us to have different thresholds for each of the sensors. This would not be ideal.

I know that what we need is essentially a IR transmitter on one side, and an IR receiver on the other. The IR receiver would likely have to have some sort of resistor over which you would measure the voltage. From this point onward I am kinda stuck. How would we go about trasmitting this voltage back to Computer over USB. Cost is of great importance for this project so hopefully it won't require any complex computation.

Any thoughts, schematics or prefabbed parts that you know of would be of great importance.

Thanks so much!

Tim

 

[dlgoff]

IR led and IR photodiodes can have a fairly small angular intensity pattern. Check out the Relative Radiant Intensity vs. Angular Displacement in figure 7 on both of these.

http://www.robokits.co.in/datasheets/TSFF5210.pdf"

http://www.robokits.co.in/datasheets/BPV10nf.pdf"