Pulse Counter Sensor

The pulse counter sensor allows you to count the number of pulses and the frequency of a signal on any pin.

On the ESP32, this sensor is even highly accurate because it’s using the hardware pulse counter peripheral on the ESP32. However, due to the use of the pulse counter peripheral, a maximum of 8 channels can be used!

../../_images/pulse-counter.png 
# Example configuration entry
sensor:
  - platform: pulse_counter
    pin: 12
    name: "Pulse Counter"

Configuration variables:

  • pin (Required, Pin): The pin to count pulses on.

  • name (Required, string): The name of the sensor.

  • count_mode (Optional): Configure how the counter should behave on a detected rising edge/falling edge.

    • rising_edge (Optional): What to do when a rising edge is detected. One of DISABLE, INCREMENT and DECREMENT. Defaults to INCREMENT.

    • falling_edge (Optional): What to do when a falling edge is detected. One of DISABLE, INCREMENT and DECREMENT. Defaults to DISABLE.

  • internal_filter (Optional, Time): If a pulse shorter than this time is detected, it’s discarded and no pulse is counted. Defaults to 13us. On the ESP32, this value can not be higher than 13us, for the ESP8266 you can use larger intervals too. If you enable this, set up the count_mode to increase on the falling edge, not leading edge. For S0 pulse meters that are used to meter power consumption 50-100 ms is a reasonable value.

  • update_interval (Optional, Time): The interval to check the sensor. Defaults to 60s.

  • id (Optional, ID): Manually specify the ID used for code generation.

  • total (Optional): Report the total number of pulses.

  • All other options from Sensor.

Note

See integration sensor for summing up pulse counter values over time.

Converting units

The sensor defaults to measuring its values using a unit of measurement of “pulses/min”. You can change this by using Sensor Filters. For example, if you’re using the pulse counter with a photodiode to count the light pulses on a power meter, you can do the following:

# Example configuration entry
sensor:
  - platform: pulse_counter
    pin: 12
    unit_of_measurement: 'kW'
    name: 'Power Meter House'
    filters:
      - multiply: 0.06  # (60s/1000 pulses per kWh)

Counting total pulses

When the total sensor is configured, the pulse_counter also reports the total number of pulses measured. When used on a power meter, this can be used to measure the total consumed energy in kWh.

# Example configuration entry
sensor:
- platform: pulse_counter
    pin: 12
    unit_of_measurement: 'kW'
    name: 'Power Meter House'
    filters:
      - multiply: 0.06  # (60s/1000 pulses per kWh)

    total:
      unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
      name: 'Energy Meter House'
      filters:
        - multiply: 0.001  # (1/1000 pulses per kWh)

See Also