Very cheap event counter

Good idea! I grew up in Roseville and used to ride my bike to the AxMan when I was a kid. It was (and aparently still is) a neet store. I haven't found a good substitute in the Orlando area.

Carl

Hmmmm--- First you said you went to Discount Steel and now you say Ax-Man. Sounds like a Mpls/St.Paul guy.

Pete Stanaitis,

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D> A friend asked me for a design to make a counter using logic chips and

For those not near the Axman, look at page 4468 in the MSC catalog. $9. for a 4 digit LCD counter.

They are about $5 apiece on eBay also, I have a couple.

Hung one on Puppy's collar one night - she did 14000 steps on that short walk. Gerry :-)} London, Canada

Fridley.

I used to live just off University and 61st in the late 70's. Gee, I wish I had half the money I spent on beer, women and song back then. Steve

Yeah, but he's walking on FOUR legs.

I learned something I never knew before....just last week...

Most quadrapeds, like your dog, our cat, or even you (When crawling), move their legs forward in a LF, RR, RF, LR sequence when walking.

But a few four legged animals walk differently, notably the camel and the giraffe, whose walking gait is LR, LF, RR, RF. I've never ridden on a camel, but those who have say their's quite a "sway" from their gait, causing some novice riders to suffer motion sickness.

Jeff

Ahhh, Jeff, hate to point this out, but you just described the same sequence twice; you just started it in different places...

What happens is that a horse moves his LF and RR more or less at the same time, then moves his RF and LR. The camel, on the other hand, moves his RF and RR together and his LF and LR together. In other words, the horse has diagonal feet on the ground together and moves straight where the camel has feet on the same side on the ground together and sways side to side to keep his balance.

And, yes, you can get royally seasick on a "ship of the desert."

Jerry

I would suspect the speed is limited by the reed switch. If you used a faster sensor, it would probably count a lot faster. Without looking at the schematic, I couldn't say for sure, but I would guess that a simple transistor (or open collector IC) in place of the reed switch would work just fine...

Jerry

That's how I tested it, with a PN2222A in place of the reed switch. I also tried a pullup on the input to overcome the low current coming out of the chip. There must be some software debounce in there; min "low" time seems to be about 80 ms for reliable counting.

I believe horses can also be trained to do right side, then left side

- it's called "pacing", used sometimes in harness racing.

You could look at some of the motion studies of horses movement for entertainment. By the time you add in the gaited horses, like the walkers and the paso's there are a lot of variations, each with there own rythm. Walk, trot, canter, pace, gallop, run, etc. There are a couple that are specific to the breed of horse as well in the gaiteds.

Cheers Trevor Jones

Probably not worth pointing out that these are available from any number of suppliers.... At least to judge from the number of different booths I saw at the last tool show I was at. (Toronto, 2006)

Of course there are hall effect sensors that would work pretty well to up the rate capability, too.

Cheers Trevor Jones

Worth pointing out to me, thanks ... I didn't know about them until someone mentioned that they're available from MSC.

The counters at the tool shows may well be able to handle higher rates than the one in a pedometer.

OK, that seems like a reasonable explanation. I still tend to think in terms of pure hardware (TTL, etc.) and am still getting used to the fact that everything these days seems to take a left turn into a processor...

Reed switches are very fast, with opening and closing times of about one millisecond, so 6 counts per second ought not to matter. What often happens is that the magnetic arrangement is such that the reed is closed for only a very short portion of a full turn, so the minimum pulsewidth spec on the counter is not met above some speed. The solution is to arrange things so the reed switch is closed for about 1/2 of the turn.

Joe Gwinn