HOW DOES THIS THING INTERFACE?? :O

[Labot2001]

Hello brobots,

Can't figure this gizmo out. We got ourselves four US Digital E4P Encoders (speed sensors) and have absolutely no idea how they interface with the electrical system of the robot.

There are four wires, picture here:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&i...disp=inline&zw

So, any halp plz? Thanks

[EricWilliams]

There are two wires for +5V and GND. The other two are Channel A and Channel B. These all get wired to the Digital Input/Output pins on the Digital Side Car. Unfortunately, since there are two channels, you must wire each channel to it's own set of pins. That leaves you with a little bit of a conundrum. What you have to do is connect the +5V, GND, and Channel A to one Digital I/O channel. Then wire Channel B to just the signal pin of another channel.

You can achieve this by cutting 2 PWM cables in half, and soldering the +5V and GND to the red and black wires of one of the PWM cables on the socket side (so you can plug it into the DSC). Channel A should be soldered to the white wire in that PWM cable. Channel B should be soldered to the white wire in the second PWM cable, and clip the red and black wires and insulate them with heatshrink or electrical tape.

Good luck!

[apalrd]

I can't get the Google pic to load, its probably me since I tend to have problems with gmail often.

It is a quadrature optical encoder, same as in the kit.
You take two PWM cables and cut the female ends off with enough cable to reach your encoders, two cables per encoder. It you don't have an that are long enough, string a few together.

Take the first PWM cable and connect:
WHITE to A
RED to +5
BLACK to GND

Take the second PWM cable and connect:
WHITE to B
RED to nothing
BLACK to nothing

Plug the PWM cables into your Digital Sidecar in the DIO section, black facing out.

[daltore]

If you are using CAN on Jaguars, you can actually interface these encoders directly to the Jaguar. There is a 5-pin encoder port on the bottom right of the Jaguar which is designed for these encoders (one pin is not used). All of the pins are labeled. These encoders should have come with their own connector cables which will give you a little room to work with so you don't have to put custom connectors into the encoder.

Our team actually uses phone cables instead of PWM cables. We got some phone couplers from the dollar store and some modular plugs and the cable from Fry's. We crimp a modular plug on the end of the cable that comes with the encoder, and put it in one of the couplers. Then we secure the coupler down. We run another cable with a modular plug one end and a 5-pin PWM connector on the other end to the Jaguar (with the pins in the right order, of course). That way, we can more easily replace a cable if gets damaged by some moving part of the robot.