It’s a bit funny. I’ve welded professionally for 4 years; I’m pretty good at brazing and
\nfabrication in general. I’ve also soldered and repaired various electrical things from appliances
\nto automobiles. With that experience I entered into making the TouchDRO with a few assumptions.<\/p>\n
I decided to buy the premade board from Yuri<\/a> for the first Touch DRO install. Part of the A 1 micron encoder counts 25,400 times per inch. It is possible that a slower processor might not So I set about hooking up the TouchDRO board to the encoders on my mill. In general that means connecting power to the board and the board to the scales. Overall a pretty simple process but as usual there were a few complications. The DRO that I am replacing is an old Acu-Rite II \u00a0DRO. It uses military grade connectors that, while, not hard to find are quite expensive. I decided to standardize on DSub-9 connectors as they are common, inexpensive and come standard on many encoders. I also decided to solder headers to the DRO board and make wiring harnesses to connect the DSub-9 connectors to the board. This would allow me to easily adapt the DRO to fit a variety of scales which should be useful as this is kind of my “development rig”. So, at a high level, the process is:<\/p>\n I’ll cover the details of these and more in a following post.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s a bit funny. I’ve welded professionally for 4 years; I’m pretty good at brazing and fabrication in general. I’ve also soldered and repaired various electrical things from appliances to automobiles. With that experience I entered into making the TouchDRO with a few assumptions. My various skills would make board level soldering easy (partially true) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14,19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/site.ironpunk.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/site.ironpunk.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/site.ironpunk.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/site.ironpunk.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/site.ironpunk.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/site.ironpunk.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":222,"href":"http:\/\/site.ironpunk.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions\/222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/site.ironpunk.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/site.ironpunk.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/site.ironpunk.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nreasoning for that was to make the install easier but part of it was that it came with a faster
\nprocessor than the MSP430 Launchpad<\/a>. I couldn’t use the Arduino board because it doesn’t support
\nQuadrature Encoders and one of my encoders has 1 micron resolution.<\/p>\n
\nbe able to keep up with the scale during rapid traversal. It is also quite possible that the slower
\nprocessor would have been fine but for the $40 price difference, I decided to go with the faster
\nprocessor and cooler looking board because I’m just that kind of a geek.<\/p>\n\n