Circuit Lake

This project is a simple Renesas M32C/84 microcontroller-based Optical PhotoElectric Beam sensor. It could be used for various applications such as security sensor, optical switch counter, electronic lever trip alarm, etc.

This project tends to do something different from the usual use of optical navigation sensor for movement detection. It will use the image capturing function of the optical sensor to capture frames of raw images. The frames of raw images are subsequently sent to M32C/84 microcontroller for image processing to enable the whole system to act as an optical photoelectric beam sensor.

The ADNS-3060 optical sensor is mounted with an LED light projected in a straight line from a distance. The distance is less than 7 cm in the case of this project’s board. Raw far field images are captured by the sensor and sent to the Renesas M32C/84 microcontroller. The firmware in the microcontroller processes them to determine whether the LED light is blocked or non-blocked. Consider the case where this configuration is used as a photoelectric security beam sensor. In the event that the LED light is blocked from reaching the sensor, the frames of image processed by the M32C/84 microcontroller will be able to determine this. The microcontroller will then sound the buzzer alarm.

An addition feature of the project would be the capability of sending the frames of raw images captured from the optical sensor through M32C/84 microcontroller’s RS232C interface to a personal computer. A Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 program is written to show the raw images dump at a frame rate. At the same time it demonstrates the same image-processing algorithm used in the M32C/84 microcontroller’s firmware.