I'm a mechanical engineer by trade and don't have a lot of experience with inductive sensors. What I want to do is a use an analog output inductive sensor (something like the Fargo S6108) mounted to a vertical slide controlled with a stepper motor so that the analog sensor is used to make adjustments to the stepper motor in order to keep the sensor always at 10mm above a metal plate. I'd plug the inductive sensor and the stepper motor driver into an Arduino for reading the sensor output voltage and converting this signal to a movement on the stepper motor.
Basically if everything was working properly, I could hold a steel plate 10mm below the sensor and move it up and down and this would cause the whole slide to move up and down (powered by the stepper motor) to maintain a constant 10mm of clearance distance. It would be a feedback loop to keep the sensor always at 10mm. For example if the nominal 10mm of distance on the sensor was equivalent to 6V and the sensor was currently reading 5V then the arduino would tell the stepper motor to move up in order to reach the desired 6V aka 10mm. Due to the presence of water and other contaminants, an optical sensor will not work.
I'm wondering if this setup is feasible and could work as described? How fast can the analog inductive sensor signal be read to make adjustments to the slide position with the stepper motor? The stepper motor will be capable of 500 IPM travel with high acceleration so it should be able to keep up fairly easily.
Basically if everything was working properly, I could hold a steel plate 10mm below the sensor and move it up and down and this would cause the whole slide to move up and down (powered by the stepper motor) to maintain a constant 10mm of clearance distance. It would be a feedback loop to keep the sensor always at 10mm. For example if the nominal 10mm of distance on the sensor was equivalent to 6V and the sensor was currently reading 5V then the arduino would tell the stepper motor to move up in order to reach the desired 6V aka 10mm. Due to the presence of water and other contaminants, an optical sensor will not work.
I'm wondering if this setup is feasible and could work as described? How fast can the analog inductive sensor signal be read to make adjustments to the slide position with the stepper motor? The stepper motor will be capable of 500 IPM travel with high acceleration so it should be able to keep up fairly easily.
