DualCounter counts too much

F

frank10

Member
I made this circuit to get contact clicks from the lamping led light of Energy meter:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/5volt/3356938784/

Instead of the K1 relè going to mouse button, I connected the relé to Dual Counter input A.

Also, I changed the R4 to about 5k and C1 to 0.22microFarad, because the relè was driven too slowly wiht the lamps of the meter: it has up to 1 lamp every 0.6 sec.


Well, it works, but when the lamps get fast, the dualcounter counts too much clicks:
i.e. I can hear the relè makes 80-82 clicks in a minute, but the dualcounter makes 145 or 120 clicks!

This means, in a day I have completely wrong results about the day consumption.

I have connected in the input B, another energy meter, with a S0 output, and this works very well, at high consumption too.
So it must be this circuit, I think. In particular the relé.
Maybe should I make it go faster between clicks?

Or what can it be?
 
How many milliseconds must be the contact in the input to get correct count in the dualcounter?

Because I tried to manually make a short contact with a push button and sometimes it gets a double count instead of one.
 
It sounds like you are getting contact bounce. In a quick look at the circuit it looks like you could leave the out the relay and hook the Dual Counter up right where the relay would have been.

Eric
 
thank you eric, I think I tried without the relé with no luck, but I don't remember for sure.
Tomorrow I will try to directly connect the output to the input A and I will tell you if the dualcounter counts.
 
I remembered wrong: it works also without the relé.

Now, I check it for some days and I will report how it counts.
Thank you.
 
Thank you a lot Eric.
Now it works very well !

So, the dualcounter doesn't like to be driven by a relè?
Or is there some ways to use the relé without the contact bounces?

I put the relè because I read the dualcounter input doesn't like external +5v that can drain the battery, so passing through the relè I thought I got a neat contact without voltage.
This way, without the relè, instead, I get some ext. +5v from the led board.

Anyway, thank you again, it was days that I didn't understand what it could be.
 
Any mechanical contacts (like a relay) will usually have bounce, some worse than others.

Using external +5v will not normally cause a problem.

Eric
 
ericvic said:
Any mechanical contacts (like a relay) will usually have bounce, some worse than others.

Using external +5v will not normally cause a problem.

Eric
Click to expand...

How can we avoid bounce ? I will use dual counter to count Water consumption & also electrical power with a ILS reed switch + magnet.

Thank you
 
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