Hello,
I need help to achieve a very difficult task for me.
We have in the plant few machines for welding plastic, based in heating plastic and pressing the parts together.
The company which made them is out of business so no luck there.
Each machine run at 110 VAC, and has almost 100 heaters.
The heaters are from 250W to 450W, and are controlled by a SSR and a heat controller which fire them at different phase angle to control the amount of heat.
The issue is that they burn out, one, or more and is hard to detect it without manual visual inspection of each part.
My task is to find a solution to detect if any heater in the machine is burned out.
I started by looking at ACS712 from allegro micro. It seems to be good , but i have a problem - ANALOG
The chip give out 0 to 5 volts with middle point at 2.5 volts for zero amps. Amps in the positive side goes 2.5 and up, and the negative side 2.5 and down.
So the output, at any amps reading is a sinusoid at 60 HZ.
For my point of view, all i need is to get a digital 0 or 1 for the result, so i can input it to a PIC.
0 if the current is under 1 Amp, and 1 if it is over 1 AMP
As i mentioned before i do not have a clue about analog, op amp to condition , or amplify the signal, or the rest. I just know plain basic of analog.
Please help , and if you have a solution which you believe it will works, a small drawing, even by hand but with component value will be great.
Thank you