Re: Low Cost Encoders
 

News: The sky is blue...sometimes ;)

Working on it but my day today is shot.
I won't let this go past the weekend.

Re: Low Cost Encoders
 

Re: Low Cost Encoders
 

LOL really? :rolleyes:

My money, my time, my priorities:
Start looking for my stuff tonight I spent the better portion of the weekend helping a friend's family in need.
It couldn't wait and I had little warning.

Now I am at work at my day job and (last I checked) we like our economy to stay working (then again we've all seen it lately ::ouch:: )

Re: Low Cost Encoders
 

I agree... More times than not you get what you pay for. Yeah, name brand encoders do cost a pretty penny. But the quality is excellent. The only time I've had a name brand encoder fail was back in 2011 when a US digital one was broken by a transmission removal mishap (I think, it's been a few years).

With cheapo ebay wonders, quality is of least concern. People will buy cheap parts because the parts are cheap. Not because of "silly" quality or warranties or customer service. Hence why with such parts if you get any of the three then you're lucky.

For a prototype, yeah, a cheap knockoff might work. But I'd personally avoid it on a competition robot. Murphy's law gives few mulligans. Especially during eliminations.

Re: Low Cost Encoders
 

I doubt that most people who claim someone else stole someone's product know the difference between a utility and design patent. A patent is the proper way to enforce these intellection properties. Simply asserting a design is stolen is inadequate. Especially when until now the only evidence anyone brought here was: it looks like an encoder.

The support issue is pretty irrelevant. In this economy most people are increasingly unlikely to get spare parts gratis and if the encoder is built properly for an application I wonder what support could be required or even needs to provided. It seems unlikey an encoder vendor is going to take the time to ship engineers and test equipment for a small purchase to hunt for an unusual problem.

Just making an optical encoder with a quadrature wheel is not a utility patent violation.
As far as the weakness of a design patent and how to enforce it Internationally that's a whole different mess and frankly that's the patent holder's obligation (so if you see something that is a direct ripoff please feel free to send them the pictures it is so not my problem).

So let's start with the high resolution pictures of the guts of these encoders.
The files are 7MB each so it took a very long time to upload over my phone (it's been uploading in fact since 1:00 AM EST while I attend to more urgent matters). There are more than the 25 pictures that are showing I am busy and I need to time clear them into the system.

I have much more data and more pictures this was what I had time for today.
For all those that claim this is probably stolen: you've got the pictures have a ball.
I really don't care who uses these or why I said I would do this and so I am.

My website for this sort of stuff

As far as low quality: look for yourself they are not paper mache

Re: Low Cost Encoders
 

Thank you very much, I appreciate it. We have a ton of bots we need to keep running for demos and at the price of encoders we usually remove them for our comp bot.

I still don't understand why people are calling this a knockoff, there's nothing new, innovative or proprietary about a quadrature encoder. Just because it comes directly from china does not mean its a stolen design.