How To Setup & Use Wenglor Distance Sensors (OPT2007 Laser Distance Sensor) at AutomationDirect

The OPT2007 is a surprisingly full featured distance sensor for the price and is a great choice for measuring distances and detecting objects within a 2 foot range. It’s just as capable as the other more expensive guys, so what’s catch? Well, It doesn’t have a fancy LCD display and easy to navigate menus like the other sensors, so it’s a little more tedious to setup. But if you want to save a little cash and can handle blinking LEDs instead of menus – then you definitely want to take a look at this guy. The sensor comes with an insert that tells you everything you need to know on half a page. You can also download that insert from the website so don’t worry about misplacing it. To get the sensor back to factory reset, rotate the selector to this A2POTI setting and hold down both the plus and minus keys until the red V LED blinks. Set the selector back to RUN and the sensor is reset to factory default. What are the factory defaults? Anything with an asterisk next to it on the product insert – these guys. To change the output type, just rotate the selector to this A1POTI position and press both the plus and minus keys until the red V LED blinks – it takes about 5 seconds. Now just press the plus key to set it to PNP. Press the Minus key to set it to NPN – and press both to get a Push Pull output. I’m going to change this back to NPN. Return the selector switch to RUN and both outputs are now set to the same type. Note that you can’t set just one output. They both get set to this type. This isn’t a standalone setting - it is actually part of the Teach process, so … Teaching is a two step process. First you select the mode for each pin – do you want Window mode, Foreground/background mode and for A2 you can also specify that it is an Error output. Once you have selected the mode, then you do the actual teach. Let’s try it. Rotate the selector to MODE. The plus key changes A1 between Window mode – LED on - and foreground/background – LED Off. Let’s put A1 in Window mode – LED on. The Minus Key Changes A2: If A2 is lit – it’s in window mode. If the red V is lit that means A2 is an Error Out signal and if both V and A2 are off well, A2 is the default foreground/Background mode. We’ll leave A2 there as a foreground/Background detection. Switch back to run and you have set the mode. Once you have selected the mode, now you teach it by selecting the output AND type – Normally Open or Normaly Closed. We set A2 to be Foreground/Background mode in step 1. To teach it as a foreground object detector, just point the laser at the object you want to detect and press the plus key – the Plus LED will blink twice to confirm. Set selector back to RUN. Now any object the comes closer than that distance will activate pin A2. To teach A2 on the background, just point the laser at the background and press the minus key. When the Minus LED blinks twice, it’s done. Set the selector back to RUN. Now pin A2 will go active for any object it detects closer than the background. We left output pin A1 in Window mode. To teach that –set an object where you want the center of the window to be and press the plus key – when BOTH plus and minus LEDs blink twice – like this – window teach is done. Set the selector back to RUN. Now the sensor will only detect objects within a window around that mid point. How wide is the window? The default window is 20% of the range of the sensor, which is around 130 mm. Can you change that? Sure … Set the selector to the P O T I for that output – A1 in our case. The plus key makes the window wider and the minus key makes it narrower. If either key blinks - like this - then you have hit the upper or lower limit of the allowed window width. It’s a little subtle, but you look closely you can actually gauge where you are by watching the LEDs – it’s a little hard to see in this video, but the intensity of the LEDs changes as you get closer and closer to a limit. The closer you get to the widest window, the brighter the plus LED gets. The closer to the minimum window, the brighter the minus LED gets. I found there’s a little over 50 button presses between max and min. You can also hold the button down and let it gradually change. Once you get the window you want, switch the selector back to RUN. Suppose you want to modify the detection point that you taught in foreground or background mode. Just set the selector to the potentiometer setting for the output you want to adjust. That would be A2 in our case since that’s the one that was set to foreground/background mode. The plus key increases the distance, and the minus key reduces the distance. If you hit the max or min distance the corresponding LED will blink. And just like in Window mode, the LEDs brightness changes to indicate where you are in the range. I found there are around 160 button presses to get from max to min. You can also just hold the button in and it will move the detection point – it took mine about 30 seconds to traverse the entire range from min to max. To Configure the Input pin, set the selector to MODE and press and hold both the plus and minus keys until the red LED blinks – it’ll take about 5 seconds. The Plus button controls A1– if the plus LED is lit, that says the Input pin will be used for external teach of Pin A1. If the LED is OFF – the external teach is disabled for output A1 Press the Minus key to change output A2 to external teach. If the LED is lit, External Teach enabled. If the LED is off then external teach disabled for pin A2. If both the Plus and minus keys are lit – then the Input pin is used to do external teach on both output pins. If both LEDs are off, the Input pin defaults to be a laser disable when 24 Volts is applied. You can flip that by holding down both keys until they both blink. That inverts the laser enable - the input will now disable the laser when 0 volts is applied. Now when you are using external teach, make sure you hold the input pin active for at least 1 second. About 2 and a half seconds after that, the sensor will be ready to go. Got a question? During regular business hours you can call, e-mail, or even do on-line chat with AutomationDirect’s award winning tech support staff here in the US within minutes. AutomationDirect.com offers Wenglor distance measuring sensors from 80 micro meters all the way out to 100 meters to cover all of your distance measuring needs.