Counting & measuring pulse expertise?

[mjwalsh]

Has anyone worked with some type of oscilloscope to measure the pulse length & reliability of a finicky coin mech that some of us might struggle with? It seems that it could cut down on some guess work & unnecessary parts swapping. Sometimes there could be the printed circuit board thingy (whatever) that accepts the pulses can also be finicky so the temptation is to throw both parts away solving the problem. It seems it also could help to rule out some tricky connection issue preventing untimely downtime too.

MJ

 

[sparkey]

I have never done it to a coin mech, but I am a controls engineer in my day job. It would be simple to look at the waveform sent by a coin mechenism. It would show you amplitude (voltage) and you could also measure the pulse width. With the scope you would also be able to see any stray noise on the signal lines,

 

[mjc3333]

Has anyone worked with some type of oscilloscope to measure the pulse length & reliability of a finicky coin mech that some of us might struggle with? It seems that it could cut down on some guess work & unnecessary parts swapping. Sometimes there could be the printed circuit board thingy (whatever) that accepts the pulses can also be finicky so the temptation is to throw both parts away solving the problem. It seems it also could help to rule out some tricky connection issue preventing untimely downtime too.

MJ

What brand coin mech are you referring to?

 

[mjwalsh]

What brand coin mech are you referring to?

mjc3333,

Any brand that anyone may purchase a large quantity of. Hopefully, they all have pretty good quality control. It seems like it would be in the manufacturers' interest that any potential problem would be more accurately pinpointed rather than speculated about. It could be used to rule out the coin mech as part of whatever issue develops so the operator could focus entirely on the terminals or partially broken wire or whatever.

MJ

 

[MEP001]

It seems like it would be a lot less trouble to change out the suspect part and tag the old one to get repaired or thrown out if it's found to be the problem. I built a test rig once that was nothing more than a pilot light operated from the coin signal to check an acceptor for pulses. The manufacturers' tests aren't much more than that.

 

[RykoPro]

You could just use a voltage meter, analog works the best when looking for short pulses.