Interfacing Sensors with Process Controller

You can quite easily interface sensors with Process Controller. Process Controller can be interfaced with pH probes, temperature probes, dissolved oxygen probes, and pressure sensors. Below is an auto tutorial on interfacing a pressure sensor with process control software.

Auto Tutorial for Pressure Sensor

This portion is part of a larger tutorial to set up a sample laboratory process of adding chemical to a tank and the start of which can be found here.

Before starting this tutorial, plumb your large tank to ensure that it can drain to the sink.

In this section of the tutorial, we wish to add a pressure sensor to measure the change in tank water level over time.

Step One: Plug in Pressure Sensor to Sensor Box

Find a 7 kPa pressure sensor and plug it into the Sensor Box. Note the location of sensor by the number.

[picture of pressure sensor plugged into sensor box, highlight location)

Step Two: Add the Pressure Sensor to the Experiment

Plug the pressure sensor into the tank at the bottom. Fit a 0.25" O.D. inflexible tubing over the end of the pressure sensor that should be in contact with the water as shown in the picture below.

picture of pressure sensor connected to larger tank

Step Three: Set up Pressure Sensor in Process Controller

Navigate back to the configuration screen and click on "Sensor configuration and calibration" as shown in the figure below.

Next in the sensor configuration and calibration screen, click insert sensor. In order to utilize this sensor we first have to calibrate it. Remember that the type of sensor we selected was a 7 kPa pressure sensor, so we should choose a calibration from one of the 7 kPa files.

Click on the far right folder highlighted in the figure below to open an existing sensor calibration file. We want to select "cm of water.smc" as the calibration file which will read the water height in the tank from the pressure sensor in centimeters of height.

The path directory to find this calibration file is: enviro\enviro on enviro\Software\Data Server\Sensor Calibration\7 kPa