Re: DRO / linear scales vs. wire driven rotary

I have the DRO board kit from Camtronics as well and was planning to go the
rotary encoder route described by Bubba. Then I talked to the engineers
at U.S. Digital a while ago and they were talking about making a head
and a linear scale at 500 lpi. The higest res they carry now is 360
which is 1440 in quad = res of .00064" which I didn't think was good enough.
The 500 would be 2000 in quad = res of .0005 which I did think would be
good enough (has anyone used the 360 strips?). So I thought I'd wait and
see if they'd offer it. I thought the linear strip solution would be
a cleaner mount and setup than having to cope with the wire arrangement.

I guess the problem for the higher res strips the first time around was
there were some issues with part yields. I contacted them recently and
was told essentially, "the higher res linear strip was a project on hold
for the moment".

So I'm back to looking at the rotary encoder driven by the wire arrangement
which Bubba describes. Bubba does an excellent job on his web site of
supplying information about the blocks, mounting arrangement, and software
(thanks! .... although the .pdf drawing of the blocks is unreadable at least
here and the pictures are a little too small to really see anything useful
... not to sound ungrateful mind you :-). Unfortunately the encoders he
describes using are one of those "you should have been here yesterday
deals when they were giving them away deals".

Has anyone here built a DRO using Bubba's board design, the Lindsey board or
the Camtronics board using wire to rotary encoder arrangement and what
encoders did you use?

Ken Jenkins
kjenkins@...

> Message: 10
> Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 17:19:34 -0400
> From: Country Bubba <axtein@...>
> Subject: Re: using servo motors w/encoders for my DRO??
>
> Yep,
> Basically, what I did was to eliminate the servo motor and made new mounts
> for the encoders and then modified Steve's program to work with my
> computers. We now have a completely re-written version of the program along
> with a new interface using 4 IC's and a handful of resistors.
>
> All of the information including the updated software can be found in the
> link in my tag line.
> enjoy and write off line if I can help.
>
> At 05:32 PM 10/25/02 +0000, you wrote:
>> With my servo controller turned off, is it feasible to use the
>> encoders off my servo motors for a DRO?
>>
>> I have the kit from Camtronics and seperate linear scales (US
>> digital) but I'd rather not have to mount the scales if I don't have
>> to.
>>
>>
>> If the Camtronics kit wouldn't work, could I just use the software
>> from lindsayengraving.com?
>>
>> anything wrong with this idea?
>>
>
> Bubba
>
> OLDER THAN DIRT
> Country Bubba
> (Actually the inventor of Country and Bubba)
>
> axtein@...
> LaGrange, GA
>
> http://ns1.dicomm.net/~axtein/dro
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]