The development road of early tablet counting machine technology

In the 1970s, electronic counting machines have been widely used in Europe. In China, it was impossible to see this kind of "artifact" under the social economic system and market environment at that time. At that time, China's basic counting method for medicine tablets, candies and granules was still in the way of counting tablets and manual counting, which was very crude and unsanitary.

At that time in Europe, when using this electronic counting machine, the real starting point was to solve the fatigue of laborers, unlike the current research and development to reduce labor, reduce costs and other "noble scientific research topics". The prototype of the electronic counting machine is a small electronic counting machine.

The first generation of electronic counting machine:

It is a small electronic counting machine, and its volume is only the size of a desktop computer. It can be said to be an electronic instrument. It mainly uses the principle of photoelectric counting sensor and is used for counting small moving objects. Due to its high speed, Non-contact measurement has advantages such as low requirements for the falling position of objects, so it is widely used in seed counting machines in agricultural instruments.

The second generation photoelectric counting machine:

It was not officially used in the pharmaceutical industry until the end of the 1970s. We call it the first generation of photoelectric counting machine. Perhaps, I prefer to call it a fully automatic electronic counting machine. Why do you say that? Because the real meaning of research and development and innovation based on the original seed counting is a quantum leap in high-speed counting. It is a tangible solution to labor, reducing the cost of use, and fully automating the mechanical packaging equipment outsourced by the pharmaceutical industry.

At that time, the working principle of the technology: through the initial adjustment of the vibrating feed plate, the medicine particles in the hopper were continuously vibrated forward along the vibrating plate track until they fell from the front photoelectric detection channel and touched the photoelectric sensor to start working and counting. When the medicine particles reached After the predetermined quantity, the PLC will give the electrical valve signal to close the feeding port, and the counted medicine pellets will fall on the outlet bottle to realize the counting function. (At present, many domestic manufacturers of counting machines basically use this To complete the form, the mechanical part is controlled by servo motors and cylinders.) This method is the most popular in the pharmaceutical industry.

Disadvantages: This method has a large error rate in counting grains, and the speed cannot be increased. Because the PLC single machine adopts the serial execution command, the speed is not fast, and the infrared pulse is single-line scanning. The realization of the implementation of the photoelectric counting machine in the true sense is due to the several times the labor cost in recent years. Pharmaceutical factories have once again put forward higher requirements for the counting ability of the counting machine, and these two core points : The speed of the counting machine should be faster and the accuracy should be higher.