Development Of An Automated Counter System For Small And Medium Enterprises

ABSTRACT

Counting is a very common activity in our daily lives and when inaccurate results are produced, it could cost us dearly in terms of loss in production, profit and finances. This inaccuracy is very common with the manual method of counting due to fatigue from task repetition over a long period oftime. This project develops an automated counter system to solve the challenge of packaging items below or above advertised quantity to customers by many small scale business organizations with focus on lightweight items. The automated counter system was designed as an embedded system. The entire system is made up of three major phases which are the conveying, sensing and counting phases. The conveying phase is made up of the conveyor belt, the DC (stepper) motor that drives it as well as the servomotor that drives the door system to open and close so items can move from the items dock onto the belt. The sensing phase comprises mainly of the ultrasonic sensor unit (HC-SR04) which detects an item within range on the conveyor belt while the counting phase is achieved by using the Arduino microcontroller (A TMEGA32p) to increment the value of the count variable in memory. The controller checks the count value against the constant maximum count value to display the value as appropriate on the liquid crystal display (LCD). The developed system is evaluated using mean time between failure (MTBF) and rate of occurrence of failure (ROCOF). The system components were assembled and connected using a breadboard to test the prototype before transferring the design onto a veroboard and soldering components permanently. After successfully coupling the prototype components, hardware testing was carried out to determine the speed of the conveyor belt (0.428m), gate movement time delay (3.82s), voltage of adaptor s (12V - 15V). After operating for a span of fifteen minutes, the MTBF gave a result of 0.0114hours/failure while the rate of occurrence of failure was 87.72failures/hour. This project work designed and implemented a hardware prototype of an automated counter system. The developed prototype can be used in industries that produce lightweight items. A recommended improvement to the work done would be to develop a single power unit and incorporate a keypad to set the desired maximum count.