I saw the BRX was available,and before I could order it was out of stock! Any idea when they become available again?
I am interested in doing an experiment with them unrelated to thermocouples. We use water sensors including DO, pH, ORP, Ammonia, Conductivity, temperature, etc. What I am discovering is that all of these sensors have +- millivolt outputs as the raw data.
The sensor probes are fairly inexpensive because they are manufactured in large volumes and are replaced frequently. However the transmitters that connect to them are expensive and that is a big problem for us. The instrumentation we use in a 10,000 gallon per day waste treatment plant is exactly the same as a 1 million gallon per day plant! If I use the instrumentation from one of the majors they cost more than all the rest of our controls combined! We need those sensors in our small systems that will hopefully get produced in large numbers because we build them over and over the same way.
Recently a vendor discontinued a transmitter causing a major scramble to find a new one. Another vendor decided to stop selling a single channel transmitter and sell only the two channel version at almost twice the price. This gets old really quickly.
If we can take the millivolt signals directly into the PLC and work with that data the cost saving would be dramatic. We would make the calibration procedure part of our program and then our customers could use the sensors from almost any vendor on our system. We already use a couple sensors that are private labeled by lots of companies, each with a proprietary transmitter. We don't even require accuracy, that's for labs. All we need is repeat-ability of the input. If the pH probe says 7 and know from other testing it is really an 8 but the process is working fine you are perfectly ok.
Of course a BRX sensor module for us would be killer. Most of our customers can't really afford our product. The states force them to buy something because their discharge doesn't meet limits. We don't even have to worry about long wire lengths or local displays. Our whole product including the control panel is built on a single skid so standing in front of the HMI you can see every instrument too.
Topic: BRX Thermocouple module availability (Read 5995 times)