In addition, if you do have shelves full of inventory, then you are well aware of the challenges BeanCounter was bult to address. Whether you are making a fewwidgets for fun, throwing together badges for a con, or stocking your online shop, you have better ways to spend your time than counting grains of rice.
Even a hobbyist with a shoebox full of cut tape will grow tired of tallying parts by hand or measuring lengths and doing division. You don't need to have shelves and shelves of inventory to be overwhelmed by the task of counting SMT components. Scales From a Single Drawer to a Room Full of Bins And we add a "pause" button to solve this problem that you can use to freeze the count while pulling empty tape. Because it does not detect empty pockets, you will need to make sure it begins counting after any empty tape has been oulled through and stops counting before it reaches the tail. This features allows it to count upward in one direction and backward in the other, which is useful in kitting contexts where you may be cutting fixed quantities off the end of a full reel.īeanCounter can be configured for varying part pitch in either mode, so you can accurately count any part that physically fits through the counter.ĭigging a little deeper, what BeanCounter actually does is count feed holes and divide by the prt bitch. Inventory Mode- Using only one sensor, BeanCounter polls at its fastest rate, allowing you to count long tapes and partial reels very quickly.ĭispense Mode- Using both sensors, BeanCounter can detect the direction in which you are pulling the tape.
To use BeanCounter, just turn it on and pull tape through, and it will immediately work by one of the two modes: It works with any opaque, 8-mm-wide carrier tape up to 2mm i height, which covers most most 0805-or-smaller LEDs and passives, as well as SOT23 transistors. Powered by a CR2023 coin cell, it has the ability to count parts as fast as possible by using two IR photointerrupters.