Counter with increment acknowledge

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It seems after all these good ideas that there is one problem. Even if you receive some sort of acknowledgement that the counter has incremented, you dont know that it has actually made the count. In otherwords, say the train comes through and the circuits indicate an increment of the counter, but the actual number in the counter, for whatever reason, does not change. Then your stuck with a false count. The ONLY way you can KNOW that the counter has actually incremented is to LOOK AT THE COUNTER DISPLAY. If you are going to trust that a signal is telling you it has incremented, you could just as well trust the signal from the switch that increments the counter. Its either/or, but you still dont KNOW its incremented without seeing the counter. You either trust the circuit to do its job, or you babysit it to make sure it does it, then you kill the whole reason to have an automated counter. The BEST way to implement a relatively safe system is redundancy in the counters and circuits. Then you periodically compare the counters either manually or by a software program. If the numbers are the same, the software just keeps comparing. If for some reason the two counters get out of sync, then the software can send an alarm to you so you can check the counters. That would be what I might do. Hope this helps somewhat. God bless. Brian

Heck if you are that worried you could have a computer "look" at the counter with a camera and do image recognition on it to be sure if changes before sending the acknowledge... or perhaps have the operator at the other end retype the number back and send it to the button end for checking.