Recreating Problem Photogate Setup

October 05, 2007
By Dan Peirce

Also see See ../photogate/ for an interpretation of the results.

Jill sent me and email today stating that earlier this week she had one setup that was showing erroneous data. The load resistor was out. Once she replaced the load resistor the setup worked. I was able to recreate this consistently with that particular setup and record waveforms this afternoon.




The no load waveform looked like this:

The 220 ohm load waveform looked like this



Note that in the unloaded case every edge is read as a falling edge so it was possible to catch 16 "falling" edges with only 9 pickets on the fence.




See ../photogate/