Automatic Coal Consumption Tracking

mdrelyea wrote:So I hooked up a pedometer to the shaft of the feed auger on my Alaska 140. It worked great to track the number of revolutions. I kept good records to determine that 1 revolution feeds about 0.1017 lbs of my oiled Reading coal. Sure would be nice, I thought, to not have to write down the number of revolutions. Since I have a computer that is always on, I wanted to record a date/time on the computer each time a revolution was recorded. That would give me the best possible resolution on my consumption data.

The normal solution there is to hook a switch up to a serial port and write your own program to do it. Since a lot of computers now don't even come with a serial port I wanted to do it via USB. After a lot of searching I found this little board. To the computer it looks like a keyboard (or a mouse, or a gamepad).

Using the technique I had learned when hooking up the pedometer, I put a magnet on the shaft of the auger and a reed switch mounted off to the side of the auger. I hooked up the reed switch to the board that I bought and plugged that in to a USB port. I configured the board so that every time the switch was triggered it looked like I had pressed Ctrl-Shift-Alt-E on the keyboard. I then set up a very small batch file with one command:
echo 1,%date:~4% %time:~0,8% >> "%userprofile%\My Documents\Revolutions %date:~4,2%-%date:~-4%.csv"
which just adds a new line containing the number of revolutions (just 1) and the date/time to a file in the My Documents folder. It will create a new file each month. Finally, created a desktop shortcut to my batch file and then assigned a shortcut key to the desktop shortcut. My shortcut key is Ctrl-Shift-Alt-E.

So, whenever the feed auger makes a full revolution, the reed switch is triggered, my computer sees a Ctrl-Shift-Alt-E, runs my batch file, and records a date/time in a file on my computer. I've had it running for a few days now and it is working great.

I no longer need to weigh my coal or write anything down to keep track of my consumption - and I can track it much more closely than I ever did before!

lsayre wrote:I thought I was doing pretty good with hitting my advanced usage predictions within typically about 8-10 lbs. over a 3 day period, but this level of precision is awesome.

That said, counting revolutions after they have occurred is not predictive of coal consumption in advance based upon the weather conditions. It is only precision achieved after the fact. Prediction should be your next step. Predicting revolutions per HDD (in advance of them happening) will turn this into a powerful coal consumption forecasting tool.

lsayre wrote:That said, counting revolutions after they have occurred is not predictive of coal consumption in advance based upon the weather conditions. It is only precision achieved after the fact. Prediction should be your next step. Predicting revolutions per HDD (in advance of them happening) will turn this into a powerful coal consumption forecasting tool.