How to make a contact-less digital tachometer using IR-

light reflection technique

Posted on April 21, 2011 by R-B 41 comments   |   

Tachometer is a device that measures the rotational speed of any shaft or disc. The unit of
the measurement is usually revolutions per minute or RPM. The traditional method of
measuring RPM of a rotating shaft was based on velocity feedback concept where a dc
generator is hooked to the rotating shaft so that the voltage induced across the generator’s
terminals is proportional to the speed of the shaft. Today, we are going to make a digital
tachometer based on a PIC microcontroller that requires no physical contact with the
rotating shaft to measure its rotational speed. The physical contact is avoided by using an
optical detection technique that requires an infrared light emitting diode in conjunction with
a photo detecting diode. StartUSB for PIC from mikroElektronika is the main controller
board used in this project. To read more about this board, visit my article Getting started
with PIC18F Microcontrollers. This tachometer can measure speeds up to 99960 RPM with
the resolution of 60 RPM. The result is shown on a 16×2 character LCD display.

Contact-less digital tachometer using StartUSB for PIC and optical sensors

Theory

The contact with the rotating shaft is avoided with an optical sensing mechanism that uses
an infrared (IR) light emitting diode and a photo detecting diode. The IR LED transmits an
infrared light towards the rotating disc and the photo detecting diode receives the reflected
light beam. This special arrangement of sensors is placed at about an inch away and facing
towards the rotating disc. If the surface of the disc is rough and dark, the reflected IR light
will be negligible. A tiny piece of white paper glued to the rotating disc is just enough to
reflect the incident IR light when it passes in front of the sensor, which happens once per
rotation (shown below).

Rotating disc with a reflector

If the entire disc surface is bright and reflective, use a piece of black paper instead so that
the IR light will be absorbed by this portion once per rotation. In either case, a pulse will be
generated at the output of the signal conditioning circuit for each complete rotation of the
disc. The circuit diagram for the sensor part is shown below.
IR sensors and signal conditioning circuit

When the IR Tx pin is pulled high, the BC547 transistor (NPN) conducts and infrared light
is transmitted. This is controlled through RA3 pin of PIC18F255o, and is turned on for 1
sec during which the number of reflected pulses received by the photo detecting diode are
counted. The pulses appears at the collector of the BC557 transistor (PNP) goes to
RA4/T0CKI pin of PIC18F2550. It is the external input pin for Timer0 module which
counts the external pulses arriving at this pin. Under normal condition, the resistance of
photo detecting diode is very high and therefore, the BC557 transistor is almost cut-off. The
output at its collector is pulled to ground. When the photo detecting diode receives the
reflected IR light, it’s resistance drops and BC557 conducts, and the collector output goes
high. Thus, this simple circuit converts the reflected IR light from the white mark on the
rotating disc into a pulse.

Timer0 Module in PIC18F2550

The Timer0 module in PIC16F series is 8-bit but in case of PIC18F2550, it is software
selectable for 8- or 16-bit mode. Its operation is controlled by T0CON register; the function
of each bit in the T0CON register is shown below.
T0CON register

For our purpose, the Timer0 module will be configured as a 16-bit counter to count the
number of pulses arriving at RA4/T0CKI input pin. The counter will be active for 1 sec and
the number of pulses arrived during this interval will be recorded, and later multiplied by
60 to get the RPM of the disc. Without an overflow, the Timer0 in 16-bit mode can count
up to 65535, that corresponds to 3932100 RPM. However, in this project, we will limit the
range up to 99960 RPM. To serve our need, we will clear T08BIT (16-bit mode) and T0SE
(increment on high-to-low transition on T0CKI pin) bits, and set T0CS (counter mode) and
PSA (no prescaler) bits.

Circuit setup

As I mentioned earlier, I am using StartUSB for PIC board for demonstration of this
technique, and therefore, I am not providing the detail circuit diagram of this project.
Rather, I will be showing the connections of LCD and the sensor unit (described above) to
the board, as shown below. LCD data bits D4-D7 (11-14) are driven through RB4-RB7
pins, whereas the control pins, RS (4) and E (6) are connected to RC6 and RC7 pins of
PIC18F2550. The transmission of infrared light is controlled by RA3 pin, whereas the
reflected pulses are fed to the T0CKI pin. The microcontroller runs at 48.0 MHz using its
internal PLL. The circuit diagram for the board itself can be found here.

LCD and sensor module connections to StartUSB for PIC board

Complete circuit setup
IR light emitting and photo-detecting diodes with a blocker in between

Software

As usual, I used my favorite mikroC compiler from mikroElektronika for programming the
PIC. No external programmer is required with StartUSB board as the on-board PIC has pre-
programmed with mikroElektronika’s fast USB bootloader. Those who are not familiar
with StartUSB for PIC board, read my previous article Getting started with PIC18F
Microcontrollers. The programming part is not very tough for this. It involves the
initialization of I/O ports and Timer0 control register. The LCD interfacing part uses
mikroC’s built-in LCD library functions, read my article ‘How to interface a character LCD
with PIC‘ if you are new to this.

Download mikroC project files

Once the program is loaded into the microcontroller, reset the StartUSB board and wait for
5 sec till it comes out of bootloader mode and starts running the application for your
contact-less tachometer.

Tachometer in action

Conclusion

A digital tachometer based on an infrared light reflection technique has been demonstrated
successfully. Its major advantage is that it doesn’t require any physical contact with the
rotating shaft to measure its speed. This project can be extended further by adding data
logging feature to it. This is required in certain applications where the RPM of a rotating
shaft is needed to be monitored. The data logger will keep the records of varying RPM over
time, and those records can be later transferred to a PC through the USB interface.