pic: 114-Sensor Teaser

[CD47-Bot]

[cdm-description=photo]17015[/cdm-description]

[Rickertsen2]

Well its pretty obvious what it is, but i have one question. Why didn't you just save the effort, money, and weight by buying one off the shelf?

[steven114]

Well its pretty obvious what it is, but i have one question. Why didn't you just save the effort, money, and weight by buying one off the shelf?

Because we didn't see any that fit our criteria and was in stock at Digikey, and because it was a fun learning experience.

[Jay H 237]

That's neat. :) It's not too often you see people making thier own encoders from scratch.

[steven114]

That's neat. :) It's not too often you see people making thier own encoders from scratch.
Instead of spending $50+ on each encoder, we spent a total of (maybe) $5, and it works quite well. I wired them up with a buffer and comparator to provide a digital output, which goes to two interrupt pins. Works great :D

[Kevin Karan]

Instead of spending $50+ on each encoder, we spent a total of (maybe) $5, and it works quite well. I wired them up with a buffer and comparator to provide a digital output, which goes to two interrupt pins. Works great :D
We made ours from scratch, but we kept it very small, and light. We made our disks out of polystyrene and the holder out of acrylic, cut them out on our laser. What is that big hunk of metal for, is it a guard?

[jacob_dilles]

wow our team stuck 2 strips of retro reflective tape on the drillmotor-gearbox coupler and used the banner sensors... how much sucess have you had with the inturupts?

[steven114]

wow our team stuck 2 strips of retro reflective tape on the drillmotor-gearbox coupler and used the banner sensors... how much sucess have you had with the inturupts?

The big hunk of metal is actually the drivetrain mount - it is doubling as a sensor enclosure. The interrupts work flawlessly - whenever something went wrong it was the circuitry, not the RC or interrupts.