I wanted a digital read out for my mill, as its imperial but the dials don't make sense to me even knowing that. But I didn't want to spend a single big chunk of money out on on a sino off ebay.
I bought a yadro kit (yadro.de) from LS Caine electronics (he no longer carries them as a kit), and put it together. Most pain was finding a way to get dos onto the old pc I used, since it had a non working floppy drive.
I ended up installing dos onto a boot cd and doing it that way. Software is quite sophisticated in that it allows co-ordinate drilling, step by step mode, pocket milling, tool width compensation etc. In fact its user extendable via macro's you can write yourself. It cant however interface to glass quadrature scales without a extra adapter per scale.
Boxed it in the same case as my homebuilt revmaster tacho , which you can see at the front.
If you buy a cheap chinese digi caliper, they have connectors inside to connect them to remote displays. There are now a few protocols on the market but I hit lucky and bought some caliper heads from allendale stores which spoke the correct one. The small cap across the battery terminals is to prevent noise, and the caliper head is powered from the yadro above.
Quick test, chunky dos program = easy to see. I'm going to use a old 12" ibm till monitor for the final version as its pre-ruggarized for the environment.
My mill needs a 650mm scale for the Y axis, so the price of a real 650mm digital scale or caliper is pretty expensive. So I decided to make my own.
This green thing is a "wixey digital table saw replacement dro strip" sourced from allendale stores. Its meant to repair a broken saw fence strip for a wixey table saw dro. But... it works ok with my calipers too, so for 29 pound, you can get 1.5 m of strip. And that is a LOT cheaper than buying a dedicated longer caliper.
Wixey's parts list :-
http://www.wixey.com/fence/spareparts/index.html
You don't need all the buttons or display on the caliper read heads either, in fact if you get down to brass tacks, you just need the wixey strip and the caliper pcb. Like this :-
So I have my caliper ingredients, a cheap piece of alu profile, a dro strip and a cheap replacement caliper head from allendale stores.
Mill a slot in the profile for the dro strip to fit flush into.
Test it out with a orphaned caliper head, all seems well.
This is where I'm at. I am making a new caliper head mounting from delrin, and mounting the pcb inside that. This gives me space to add some felt wipers to the end, more support for the wiring, and more area to bolt a bracket to fix the moving element to the machine with.
Im actually going to fix the head to the machine base, so the table moves the whole scale section so there is less movement of the wires. And once this step is finished, I will cover it all with a inverted U shaped cover to keep chips and suds away from it, as the system would be ruined by chips in the wrong bit...
A friend asked me to think about making him one too, and thats when I found the yadro was no longer available as a kit. So I did some searching around and found this :-
http://www.msh-tools.com/DRO/micro.html
For the price I couldnt resist a tinker, thinking I could add a dro to the lathe for roughing out with then finishing with the dials and micrometers if needed and at the same time helping a friend out.
Voila, one SiLabs toolstick programming adapter with one SiLabs dev board attached. Ive uploaded the firmware to the dev board and it now identifies itself to a windows machine as the USB DRO adapter as described at the msh site.
This is what I'll be sending my friend once Ive added the resistors to control the voltage for the scales and verified it works with the scales I built above.
The software for this DRO is windows based, so you don't have to dedicate a computer to dos to run it, however it also looks like its lacking the sophistication of the yadro unit. On the quick test play I had, it appears to only have the facility to change units or zero the scales etc. Theres also a Ipad/Iphone version of the application if you have a jailbroken i*.
I might put one on the shaper for a giggle if it works ok just to horrify the purists
There is another pc based dro which can read quadrature glass scales via the parallel port, but as Im too poor to afford glass scales I haven't played with it.
So Im at the making new caliper head housings stage, and waiting for more delrin to arrive impatiently...
I bought a yadro kit (yadro.de) from LS Caine electronics (he no longer carries them as a kit), and put it together. Most pain was finding a way to get dos onto the old pc I used, since it had a non working floppy drive.
I ended up installing dos onto a boot cd and doing it that way. Software is quite sophisticated in that it allows co-ordinate drilling, step by step mode, pocket milling, tool width compensation etc. In fact its user extendable via macro's you can write yourself. It cant however interface to glass quadrature scales without a extra adapter per scale.
Boxed it in the same case as my homebuilt revmaster tacho , which you can see at the front.
If you buy a cheap chinese digi caliper, they have connectors inside to connect them to remote displays. There are now a few protocols on the market but I hit lucky and bought some caliper heads from allendale stores which spoke the correct one. The small cap across the battery terminals is to prevent noise, and the caliper head is powered from the yadro above.
Quick test, chunky dos program = easy to see. I'm going to use a old 12" ibm till monitor for the final version as its pre-ruggarized for the environment.
My mill needs a 650mm scale for the Y axis, so the price of a real 650mm digital scale or caliper is pretty expensive. So I decided to make my own.
This green thing is a "wixey digital table saw replacement dro strip" sourced from allendale stores. Its meant to repair a broken saw fence strip for a wixey table saw dro. But... it works ok with my calipers too, so for 29 pound, you can get 1.5 m of strip. And that is a LOT cheaper than buying a dedicated longer caliper.
Wixey's parts list :-
http://www.wixey.com/fence/spareparts/index.html
You don't need all the buttons or display on the caliper read heads either, in fact if you get down to brass tacks, you just need the wixey strip and the caliper pcb. Like this :-
So I have my caliper ingredients, a cheap piece of alu profile, a dro strip and a cheap replacement caliper head from allendale stores.
Mill a slot in the profile for the dro strip to fit flush into.
Test it out with a orphaned caliper head, all seems well.
This is where I'm at. I am making a new caliper head mounting from delrin, and mounting the pcb inside that. This gives me space to add some felt wipers to the end, more support for the wiring, and more area to bolt a bracket to fix the moving element to the machine with.
Im actually going to fix the head to the machine base, so the table moves the whole scale section so there is less movement of the wires. And once this step is finished, I will cover it all with a inverted U shaped cover to keep chips and suds away from it, as the system would be ruined by chips in the wrong bit...
A friend asked me to think about making him one too, and thats when I found the yadro was no longer available as a kit. So I did some searching around and found this :-
http://www.msh-tools.com/DRO/micro.html
For the price I couldnt resist a tinker, thinking I could add a dro to the lathe for roughing out with then finishing with the dials and micrometers if needed and at the same time helping a friend out.
Voila, one SiLabs toolstick programming adapter with one SiLabs dev board attached. Ive uploaded the firmware to the dev board and it now identifies itself to a windows machine as the USB DRO adapter as described at the msh site.
This is what I'll be sending my friend once Ive added the resistors to control the voltage for the scales and verified it works with the scales I built above.
The software for this DRO is windows based, so you don't have to dedicate a computer to dos to run it, however it also looks like its lacking the sophistication of the yadro unit. On the quick test play I had, it appears to only have the facility to change units or zero the scales etc. Theres also a Ipad/Iphone version of the application if you have a jailbroken i*.
I might put one on the shaper for a giggle if it works ok just to horrify the purists
There is another pc based dro which can read quadrature glass scales via the parallel port, but as Im too poor to afford glass scales I haven't played with it.
So Im at the making new caliper head housings stage, and waiting for more delrin to arrive impatiently...
