Encoders on breakout board

[Kherda]

Our team thought of using the new breakout board on this year's control system to wire up a single-wire (5v, gnd, A, and B all on one 4-wire PWM) encoder using 4-pin wire-to-board terminal blocks. We thought of doing this instead of the way we did it before the new system (breaking off the A and B signals into two different PWMs). We thought of doing this with the REV proto board's (am-2994) top part, where it isn't like a breadboard.
Update: We do use absolute optical encoders.
To make things short, I was wondering if anyone has done this, and if there's been any issues with it.

[Alan Anderson]

I'd like to help answer your question, but I don't know what you are asking. What new breakout board do you mean? What is a single-wire encoder? Do you have a part number for the terminal blocks you mention?

The bit about PWMs makes no sense to me. A and B sound like the signals from a quadrature encoder, and should go to digital inputs. PWM signals are outputs.

[Tom Line]

We are using the Rev Robotics More Board since we had 15 motors at one point. They've worked well, with my only caveat being that the open nature of the board promotes bending of the pins - last time it happened when the mechanical team threw a towel over the board while drilling and towel snagged the pins.

We've also had to pull it off twice to clean off behind it due to aluminum swarf and dust. I feel like if they'd extended it a little taller and put stand-offs on it then it would have been perfect and a lot less likely to collect aluminum between it and the roborio.

[mshafer1]

My team utilizes Encoders for several reasons, although this year our encoders went on the Roborio's built in DI/O pins, we did use the Rev Robotics breakout board to control an arduino that runs some indicator lights for us.

You can indeed wire to the DI/O pins on the breakout board in much the same way as you would have in the past (I am assuming that by single cable you mean it is still an absolute optical encoder with A and B channels), and the only difference would be when you call them in begin.vi (assuming LabVIEW), that the ports become MXP DI/O __ (where blank is the channels you select).

If you mean by single cable that you are using a incremental encoder, you would just wire it's signal wire to a DI/O as if it were one of the channels (A or B) from past years, and set it up appropriately in the code (MXP or not).

If you are not using LabVIEW, then you will have to check, but I'm am fairly certain that C++ and Java (whether in Robot Builder or not I'm not sure) offer the option to use an MXP DI/O in a very similar way as using the DI/O's on the rest of the Roborio.

[Kherda]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

I'd like to help answer your question, but I don't know what you are asking. What new breakout board do you mean? What is a single-wire encoder? Do you have a part number for the terminal blocks you mention?

The bit about PWMs makes no sense to me. A and B sound like the signals from a quadrature encoder, and should go to digital inputs. PWM signals are outputs.

I was just informed that we do use absolute optical encoders. Sorry for the confusion. What I meant by single wire encoder is running all 4 encoder wires on one 4-wire PWM (5v, gnd, A, B), instead splitting the encoder wires into two 3-pin PWMs (5v, gnd, A) and (5v, gnd, B) wires that go to separate 3-pin blocks. We'd then run two different DI/O signals to the A and B pins on one 4-pin plugin block.

[Spoam]

Originally Posted by Kherda

I was just informed that we do use absolute optical encoders. Sorry for the confusion. What I meant by single wire encoder is running all 4 encoder wires on one 4-wire PWM (5v, gnd, A, B), instead splitting the encoder wires into two 3-pin PWMs (5v, gnd, A) and (5v, gnd, B) wires that go to separate 3-pin blocks. We'd then run two different DI/O signals to the A and B pins on one 4-pin plugin block.

I think you mean to say PWM cables. PWM is a type of control signal.