Any body know of an electronic turnstile?

We have a location here at the railroad where we would like to count the people as they leave but would like to avoid the eyesore of a mechanical turnstile. It needs to be weatherproof, and resetable. It would also help if it would count the people only going one way, ie, it wouldn't count the people going in the exit.

anybody got any ideas?

Thanks

TW

I dunno if this would probably work. The old library of my old school had these big plastic frames (the anti-theft magnetic things). When you stepped on the mat between the two frames you'd hear a "click click" of a counter triggered by a sensor under the piece of rug.

Aside from it making sure you weren't theiving stuff it counted the people that passed through it.

There were two of these things - you went in through one and out through the other.

Considering that you're at a railroad, I'd think a mechanical turnstile, especially a retired one from the NY City Subway, would be quite fitting...

Who remembers the ones with the big horizontal yellow wooden crossbars!!

[This message has been edited by SvenNYC (edited 02-20-2003).]

how about an electronic eye hooked up to an electrical counter. You could put up guide rails that would make people walk between 2 rails and have an eye at each rail. The number of rails would be dictated by the size of the opening.

Well I did not explain that well at all but I hope you get the picture.

Scott

With all the publicity about public-area video-camera face identification, seems like such a system could be “scaled down” to simply count bodies moving in one direction or the other. The processing horsepower to do it probably wouldn’t need to be all that great. Once you got past the initial software coding, it would probably be relatively cheap to implement, like the ”free” text-recognition software that comes with flatbed scanners nowadays.

With all respect Bjarney, I think you are grossly underestimating the difficulty of such a system. Already systems counting and checking the speed of cars are very complex. It would not surprise me if the difficulty of designing a system that can handle more than a trickle of people would approach that of face recognition.

How about using some off the shelf stuff like:
Mount a a sensor such as the ones they use on a automatic door opener, you know the ones that opens the doors when somebody walks up to them. It's basically a switch, i believe they make them WP.
Face the sensor so that it faces only the out(it would see the back of the person as thet leave)
Use the sensor to activate a counter, electronic or mechanical, which are both resetable (manually or electrically)

Pro's: all Extra low voltage wiring could be used(except for a small power supply)
Con's if somebody goes in exit it will see them.

Here are some links--seems there are many companies in the UK:
http://www.abtekcontrols.com/PDF/People%20Counter.pdf
http://www.salco.com/pc1cut.htm
http://www.irisys.co.uk/data/irisyspeoplecountersfamilydesc.pdf
http://www.pulsarmeasuring.co.uk/LDPEOPLECOUNTER.HTM
http://www.plescon.co.uk/plesweb/html2/epc.htm
http://www.q-scan.co.uk/

[This message has been edited by ThinkGood (edited 02-20-2003).]

C-H, no offense taken. Here's why I don’t think it's an impossible task.

I did some safety training in a plant where vegetables were sorted and packed. In one area they graded green peas on a fairly wide belt just before freezing. {Looked like easily a hundred pounds a minute.} It worked with a video camera and air jets that would individually "blow” the bad-looking peas off the belt. It was amazingly fast.

Also, have you seen the automatic pill counters some pharmacists use? They work at a very high rate—one can probably do a hundred pills dropping down a chute in a few seconds, and they need to be fairly precise.

Thanks for all of the replies.

I had found Q-scan, and their twin plex is actually very close to what I had in mind.

Now for the really dumb question, why are most of these companies in the UK? Paul, what's your obsession over there on counting people

This would be pretty easy if I understood logic circuits.

TW

Hello Trainwire,

Logic circuits are easy. 1+1=1 or 0 and 0+0=0 or 1 and 0=1 or 0=0 and 1=1 or 1=0. Here's the tricky one, 1+0=1 but remember, 1+0=0, also 0+1=0 except when 0+1=1. See? Piece of cake!:^)

Bjarney:

I've heard of this type of system, which can also be used to sort other things. A self-learning computer was used, which was taught what "good" and "bad" products looked like simply by showing one of each kind to the computer and pushing "good" or "bad". The more specimens you show to it, the better it gets at sorting them.

Counting people with a camera is definitely possible, but to me it seemed like much work to do something that can be done in a rather simple way.

Trainwire:

You see, one in every million people is a terrorist. The counter makes them easy to find: When 999,999 people have passed, the counter tells the police to arrest the next person to pass. Coming soon to Homeland security...

works for me!

TW

Keeping track of people seems to have become a national obsession. It's almost impossible to venture into the downtown area of any large town here these days without being captured on the CCTV cameras that have sprung up in recent years.

It's "all for our own good", of course. George Orwell was just out by a few years....

I am in the CCTV industry and using a camera as a people counter would be rather expensive and definetly not the best way to do things. The process they were using to get rid of bad peas is called machine vision, somebody programs the things to look for and when the camera sees a bad product it can take care of it. They are coming out with cameras that can learn patterning, it leans the normal flow of people and can flag somebody if they are doing something out of the ordinery, such as entering an exit. It may be a bit overkill for your application. I have installed photoelectric turnstiles that would serve your purpose, and if you went the wrong way it could set off some alarm. I will try to get some more information for you.

Just brainstorming but maybe you can follow along with my logic.

To count people, you'll need to get them to pass through your turnstyle one at a time, so the entrance door has to be narrow.

To get a count, you just set up one of those IR beams used at the door of alot of stores in the mall to ring a bell.

But you want to count people comming and not going. So you need two such IR beams, about 3" apart. When both beams are broken there must be a person in the way. If one beam is broken first, it means the person is comming. If the other is broke first, it means the person is going.

So you set up a couple of relays so that beam two clicks the counter only if beam 1 is already broken. So you only count the goers in and not the goers out.

There are digital counters off the shelf that will keep a count based on voltage pulses, NO or NC switching, or lots of other types of inputs.

And by setting the beams 3" apart, you don't ever have a person thin enough to slip between them and they are close enough together that the space between people is at least that large.

Set it up at chest height and you don't count swinging arms, pocketbooks, or legs.

Actually it's an interesting project, wonder if it would work?

hope so, I ordered the pieces!

TW

If you actually build this thing, definately let us know how it turns out.

Please post photos, also!

oof: almost scared to for fear I violated the code somewhere!
TW

Trainwire:

I just checked out your profile. I didn't realize you worked at Strasburg. I'm in southern NJ and we took our 3yr old daughter on your railroad a few months ago. Had lunch on the dining car. We all had a great time. Very nice operation you guys have there. World class.

TrainWire — You posted a photo of a really effective "crowd warmer" a few months ago. It being February, I'll bet rail patrons would appreciate you being to work that toasty gas lance {with its three-foot flame} into the final people-counter design.

Bjarney:
Depending on the job, there could be 5 of those going at one time. they'll certainly warm you up! Give you an idea, our shop is 100X40, we did a sheet in last january, 0degree's outside, shop started at 60, we were done in three hours, and the shop was at 80, we had doors hanging open.

Maintenanceguy, thanks for the kind words. We try very hard to deliver value for the price we charge. Look me up the next time your in the neighborhood.

Got the basic counter to work Now for the logic to make it count for when people only go through it one way.

TW

I got the gizmo counting people going only one way now , it's the old story, it's not what you know, it's who. Had out of state guests, and he paid for his stay by figuring out it out for me

So how did you get it to count only one way?

We started with your idea of the two beams, and finally settled on a bidirectional counter and a flip-flop ic chip with two photoelectric switches. If the switches are triggered "a then b" then one side of the flip-flop sends a count pulse to the "up" counter. The switches are wired oppositely to the other side of the flip-flop, and if they are triggered "b then a", then it pulses the "down" counter, and the counter subtracts the person who just went "in the out", and then will add them back in when they come back out.

The switches will be mounted at about waist level, about 4 inches apart. It will miss some little kids, but catch most people.

It's not perfect. But it will get us to within a couple of percentage points, for a lot less money than some of the commercial stuff that's out there. Not to mention I learned something. I prefer that to just buying something and sticking it in.

The switches will be built into the gate we will be putting up, with the counter in some sort of a weatherproof box. I have not seen the design (if there is one yet) of the gate or the fenced in area, so that part will be "engineered on the fly". I am hoping that the design of the fence and gate will permit the use of a solar panel to keep this thing working. The photoelectric switches draw about 30 MA, and the counter has it's own battery, so I got a 7.2 AH AGM battery to power the thing. I am trying o avoid having to run high voltage (which in my case is anything more than 12vdc ) to this thing. As per request, when it happens, I will get pictures.

TW

[This message has been edited by Trainwire (edited 03-06-2003).]
edited again as I think of how to say things

[This message has been edited by Trainwire (edited 03-06-2003).]

Man, I can think of about 10 different ways to do this task, but most are too extreme and $$$ to boot!!!

The simpler methods would be like you have done so far; multiple trigger points, electro-mechanical decade counter and something to invert the tally for the countees that exit (done with the R/S or J/K flip-flop).

Something in the Fuzzy Logic realm would be nice. It would capture and database anything moving in a certain direction. $$$ and training the application is a downfall (although I am unsure what the $$$ for such a simple system would be???).

Maybe an elaborate array of proxy switches, pulsing the counter would improve accuracy? Still need to invert the exiting traffic.

Just tossing out stuff.

Keep us informed!

Scott35 S.E.T.

p.s. sounds like a fun project!

Has been a fun project. I started out looking at basic stamps and all sort of logic circuits, but abandoned them as having a really steep learning curve and intitial price.

The fella that came up with this idea uses these curciuts on his trainset. The put his crossing gates up and down as his train goes by.

There is an elbow in the price/accuracy curve. I think that I am at the point of that elbow, to get any more accuracy on the count the price goes up accordingly. The situation does not require the increased accuracy, so I will stop here.

Most of my projects are fun, it's just that the learning curve on most of them goes straight up. Like learning to read the code, and apply that into the real world, or building the network from scratch, or buiding a 5 ton air conditioner from a pile of parts, and put it in where the old one(dated 1932) was. I wind up being my own apprentice.

This forum has been an invaluable help, and I appreciate that.

TW

Just a thought, but could you get those children by running the beam at a diagonal across the opening, one low and one high?