How To Wire A ToughSonic Ultrasonic Sensor
Video Transcript
Welcome to the first in our SenixVIEW tutorials: Sensor Wiring.
If you’ve been able to load the program from CD so far or download it from the website, we hope you’ll be able to follow along with us as we go through aspects of the program in this and following sessions. In this session, we’ll look at the basic sensor wiring for both six wire and nine wire sensors.
We’re here in the Main Workspace window. We’ll click on the Workspace icon on the toolbar and I’m going to load the default settings for a TSPC-30S1 (ToughSonic 14) sensor. You’ll notice on the toolbar, several of the icons are in color and a few are grayed out. Those in color pertain to the Workspace icon for Workspace and those which are grayed out pertain to sensor, which is also grayed out.
Let’s click on the wiring icon and here you’ll see all six wires with their color code. The blue and the brown for ground and DC plus, yellow and gray for communications, and the black and white analog outputs. Typically, the black wire is 4 to 20 mA current, but it can also be a sinking or sourcing switch. Similarly, the white wire is typically set for 0 to 10 V, but could also be set to be a sinking or sourcing switch. Let’s select sinking switch and see what happens on the main workspace window. You can see that we’ve added the icon indicating the logic of the switch and also its set point. If you were to wand over the vertical portion, you’ll see the hysteresis that’s been programmed. We’ll get into details of that in a later session. The same is true of the analog ramp which can be set up and that will be done in a later session as well.
Now let’s look at the nine wire sensors. Our longer-range sensors, the TSPC-15 (ToughSonic 30) and 21’s (ToughSonic 50) have some added facilities and if you look here, the first six wires are essentially the same. Blue and brown providing ground and power, yellow and gray for communications, and the black wire now is no longer 4 to 20 mA, but is only a sinking or sourcing switch and the same is true of the white wire. The analog output is provided with the green, orange, and violet lines and there is an added feature: green is current sourcing, which is what the black wire was in the 30S1, orange is current sinking, which is an additional facility, and violet is where the 0 to 10 V now resides. Looking at the main sensor window again, we see the representation of two switches.
There’s an accessory which will prove useful to you in setting up your house wiring. It’s a multifunction interconnect board which allows you to land all sensor wires, 6 or 9 plus the shield, connect to the house wiring, and here you can either pass through all the wires or pick off only the ones you’re going to work with. For convenience and bench set up, we’ve provided an input for 24 V and also in RJ11 for serial connections so that you can talk to your sensor. This board has DIN rail clips associated with it so you could put it on a rail in your electrical panel and then you could visit it to reconfigure the sensor if you wanted at a later time. In addition, if you’re setting up an RS-485 network, we’ve provided a pass-through for that network with the A and B communication lines and power and ground, input and output, and of course the interconnection to the appropriate sensor wires.
So those are the basics of wiring the sensor. In our next session we’re going to look at connection to the sensor.
If you have any questions, please contact Senix customer service. We’re here to help!
