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#22197 02/20/03 01:55 PM
Joined: Mar 2002
Posts: 360
T
Member
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

#22198 02/20/03 02:16 PM
Joined: Aug 2002
Posts: 1,691
S
Member
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... [Linked Image]

Who remembers the ones with the big horizontal yellow wooden crossbars!! [Linked Image] [Linked Image]

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

#22199 02/20/03 02:29 PM
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 209
S
Member
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

#22200 02/20/03 04:44 PM
Joined: Apr 2002
Posts: 2,527
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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.

#22201 02/20/03 05:13 PM
Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 1,498
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C-H Offline
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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.

#22202 02/20/03 06:59 PM
Joined: Jan 2003
Posts: 73
C
Member
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.

#22203 02/20/03 09:51 PM
Joined: Aug 2002
Posts: 1,081
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#22204 02/21/03 12:05 AM
Joined: Apr 2002
Posts: 2,527
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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.

#22205 02/21/03 07:25 AM
Joined: Mar 2002
Posts: 360
T
Member
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 [Linked Image]

This would be pretty easy if I understood logic circuits.

TW

#22206 02/21/03 09:00 AM
Joined: Jan 2003
Posts: 46
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Member
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!:^)

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