[Caleb Fulton]

On a "whim", we purchased a bunch of "budget" encoders to see if we could get them to work (they were less than $2 each). I made a little low pass filter by adding a capacitor between the output and ground on each phase (about 0.01uF-0.1uF seems to do the trick, thus far). It helps increase the time it takes the signal to go high due to the RC time constant caused by the pull-up resistor that is supposedly at the input pin. We have yet to *really* test it, but it really seems to rid of the noise associated with the aforementioned wiggling.

By "yet to *really* test it", I mean that we've hooked the shaft of the encoder directly to a drill running on the higher of two speeds without skipping pulses. We tested it briefly on the actual robot going around 8 ft/sec and it was working acceptably well from what I could tell. The plan may be to go ahead and order the $20 encoders everyone else is using, but it would be nice to know if the noise will really be much better for an optical encoder.

If anyone has an oscilloscope and is going to be at the Boilermaker Regional, let me know....