A coating machine in a print shop utilizes a 1-meter-wide, 10-foot-long conveyer. The belt for this part of the machine is 1cm (approx) mesh of what appears to be carbon fiber. Drive is via 200mm rollers at either end of the conveyer section.
The belt, as do all such mechanisms, doesn't want to stay centered and constantly wanders to one edge or the other. The operator must observe the location of the belt and manually adjust one of the roller's parallel-ism(?) via a knob-and-screw for this purpose. Of course, this isn't a perfect solution and the belt has many times wandered too far and frayed the edges which necessitates replacement far more frequently than should be required.
How best to automate this process? I've seen high-speed belt sanders (1-meter width) that have a solenoid that "jogs" one of the rollers when an optical sensor is tripped which "jumps" the belt sideways, but this belt is traveling at high speed and is much shorter in length than the conveyer belt, so the conveyer will not benefit from the same solution, I think.
Motor drive of the adjustment screw with optical sensors at the edges of the belt's limit? I see a microcontroller project in my future. Seems to call for some fuzzy logic or such, so that the controller can "learn" where the center is and apply just enough adjustment to limit its travel to the extremes... (more easily said than done, by a factor of a few orders of magnitude!).
Other suggestions?
Thanks,