What's inside a Hall Effect Sensor... Fix a bad signal! Tech Tip Tuesday

Hall Effect Sensors can be so beneficial on your car when being used as a crankshaft sensor, camshaft sensor, driveshaft sensor and more. These signals are crips, reliable, and up for the task to deliver zero speed condition signals with high clarity.

However, every once in a blue moon we get a problemsome case where pullup resistors, changing gap, and triple checking wiring doesn't fix things.

Our friend Glenn Payne from MADRacingparts first discovered/hypothesized that the sensor element was not the same size as the sensor tip. So we went ahead and cut some perfectly good sensors apart to inspect. The findings blew our mind!

We originally assumed the sensor tip internally was a round sensor, but it is not. The sensors are a small thin strip. Read that again (watch the vieo), the size of the outer part of the sensor does not represent the sensor size as a whole. From what we can find they're all built this same way, from Racepak to Holley to MSD to Cherry and everything in between after cutting several open and doing some research.

So a couple takeaways here and also a couple questions. Why don't manufacturers have an indicator telling or showing which way the strip goes. The good thing is that if you are unfortunate enough to have the sensor rotated perfectly to line up with teeth going by to where they're barely seeing each other and you have a noisy signal, you can simply turn the sensor 1/4 turn and now they're crossing paths completely! So takeaway, first trouble shooting needs to be sensor rotation on any hall effect sensor application with a noisy signal. Why? because its easy! After that dig into pull up resistors, wiring etc which is more indepth and intrusive.

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