Another interesting piece of electronic gear that I am hoping will be saved from the "great rubbish dump in the ground" - the tip!
Not only could this Penetrometer be of practical use to someone, but there are a couple of interesting parts inside which could be salvaged and repurposed.
I am very "big" on sustainability and wherever possible, I encourage everyone to re-use items, particularly electronic related.
A lot of energy and effort was used in the original production of any manufactured item (see my note below about EE "Embodied Energy) and to dispose of these items is so terribly wasteful of our resources, let alone the future damage we are doing to our land (through leeching) by burying tons of plastics, oils, metals and synthetic materials at our local waste disposal centres.
The estimated EE value of this complete product is 25MJ (estimated because of the material mix e.g plastics, metals) - 25MJ is almost 7kWh, that is a LOT of energy.
I hear you asking, what is a Penetrometer?
In short, this device measures pressure/force and is specifically designed to penetrate objects and measure their resistance to that penetration, their "hardness" in other words. These penetrometer's are commonly used in the fruit industry to ascertain the ripeness of various fruits or vegetables through destructive sample testing (once tested, no-one is going to buy a product with a hole punched into it!).
But with some ingenuity, this pressure measuring device can be used to measure pressure in other completely different tasks.
OEM product - the manufacturer is not identified (but most likely it is Made In China)
Fruit Hardness Tester
Type: UFL- 031D
Range: 0.4 - 30 Kg/cm2(×105Pa )
Resolution: 0.01 Kg/cm2
Accuracy: ±1%
Maximum depth of pressure head: 10mm
Device measures 230mm × 66mm × 36mm
Weight: 600g (medium weight for hand holding)
Supplied with two changeable testing heads
Power plug pack for charging
Carry case
Function: This equipment measures the hardness of fruits (pressure used to insert the "head" into the fruit under test) but the use is not limited to just fruit QC testing.
Using imagination, thinking "outside of the square" means this equipment can be used for a myriad of pressure/force testing situations totally unrelated to fruit.
The readings are available locally using the LCD screen or can be sent externally via an RS-232 port to a PC (for example)
Able to store and display up to 896 measurements or show readings continuously
Many other options can be set by the user e.g I used to set a Maximum and once reached, the unit will "beep" continously.
Completely self-contained and portable but more usually mounted on a stand as part of an automated testing process. I am NOT supplying a suitable stand (often they look a bit like a drill press stand) but the mounting will depend upon what suits your application.
The 8x mounting bolts/screws are supplied, just let you imagination do the work.
COSMETIC CONDITION:
Clean and undamaged in all aspects
LCD screen is undamaged
HISTORY - TESTING:
Originally obtained from a produce distribution company, obsolete for their needs (not faulty) as they underwent an upgrade of their Hardness QC testing equipment.
My use for this revolved around robotics of all things! I needed to measure the amount of force a robot could exert when meeting an obstacle (another robot or the wall) - so the robot is running around and when it meets up with something unexpected it was not desirable to simply shut down but the robot was then designed to exert force upon the obstacle to actually try and push the obstacle out of the way by force! Yes this was no mamsy pamsy robot, it didn't like anything getting in its way!
This equipment was used to measure how much force the robot was applying to the obstacle so that I could adjust the robot motor torque/traction etc to have the maximum force exerted by the robot effect.
I used a custom made stand to support the Penetrometer (bolts etc supplied) and connected this equipment to a PC via the RS232 serial cable (DB9 - DB9 male each end) and although it was quite a long time ago, pretty sure there was nothing special about the comms, standard 9600 baud from memory.
I have been asked "what about USB?"
There is no USB port, only the DB9 female RS232 port. It is always a good idea to have an old laptop or PC around with the old style serial ports but if you don't have one to hand then you will need to get yourself a RS232 to USB convertor (NOT SUPPLIED)
The comm's cable I am supplying is called a DCE to DCE cable - 9 pin male at each end (straight through connections) so you may need to use adapters or a converter such as the RS232~USB converter mentioned above, it depends upon your equipment situation. Actually if you thought about it, you could probably put together an adapter which takes the RS232 output from the UFL-31D and broadcasts it via Bluetooth or WiFi - no cabling is then required.
Software used on the computer here was very ordinary "freeware" designed for serial data acquisition and analysis - there is lots of this type of software online that is free and extremely useful in situations such as this. Just tell the software what port to "listen" to and in "streams" the data from the UFL-031D and then you can analyse it (if that's your purpose)
If using the equipment is of no interest, then all is not lost.
There are three primary items which may interest to someone with repurposing of components in mind
a) Pressure sensor, this is NOT branded but it is an S type high precision sensor (see one of the photographs) which is mounted using 2x hex bolts - easy to remove
b) SyncMOS SM8954AC25PP (socketed)
This microcontroller is a member of the 8052 family, 16K onboard flash RAM which no doubt is code protected so you need to erase the flash and reprogram if you were ever going to use this chip.
Datasheets on this device and programming are readily available online.
c) LCD module (42mm x 26mm 18 pin PCB connection plus 2 wires (for the backlight) on one side, no logic on the LCD module) - unfortunately this module is not identified in any way.
Secondary items that could be salvaged (remember, we are trying to sustain our raw materials and save as much as possible)
a) Nice hard PVC case which could easily be used to protect portable equipment
b) UFL-31D hard PVC casing could perhaps be utilised in another piece of equipment. Once the PCB, batteries etc is taken out it is basically empty and ready to fit another module of electronics.
c) Power plug pack would be readily useable with other equipment and it is a universal type (90V ~ 240V AC input) providing 9.16V DC @ 300mA (positive centre)
As mentioned above, its been a while since I used this gear so I undertook some basic testing using it handheld.
Charged the internal battery pack fine, not slow to charge and retaining the charge.
Turns on (blue background black characters and is backlit)
After a short "self test" it is ready to go, showing 00.0 (unit of measurement is set by the user i.e N, Kg or Lb)
Manually pushed the head and made sure readings occurred, all fine.
Created various pressures and made sure that the Hold & Store function was working - all good.
I Set a maximum force of 1Kg and slowly increased pressure until it reached 1Kg - the internal piezo buzzer goes off continuously (until the pressure is reduced)
It all looks good to me, working just fine.
As testing has been completed, I have now sealed the UFL-31D in plastic to maintain the condition (dust/dirt)
FINAL NOTE: Keep in mind that the design maximum force is 30 Kg/cm2 - don't attempt to measure very high forces with the equipment in its current form. It would be nice to know the parameters of the S sensor as I suspect that 30 Kg/cm2 limitation is due to the plastic casing used for the equipment, not a limitation of the sensor.
