Switches and Sensors – Working Principles, Applications, and Wiring
Understanding how human being functions will help you understand automation. Having a brain is not enough for a human being to operate. Sight, hearing, touch, and smell are required to provide information about the environment for the brain to process. Similarly, switches and sensors provide information about the environment for a controller to process. The result of processing determines the actions that will be carried out by an actuator, which will be discussed in the next chapter. This chapter is specifically reserved for switches and sensors to enable us to discuss actuators in depth. Just like sight, hearing, touch, and smell are important for humans to function, switches and sensors are important components that are required to automate an industrial process.
In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:
- Introducing switches and sensors
- Describing manually operated switches...