Gear Tooth Sensors versus Encoders?

[Danny Diaz]

This year we decided to look into alternatives to using the gear tooth sensors - we've used the kit-privided gear tooth sensors and also other hall-effect type sensors for measuring robot speed and position for many years now, and wanted to check out our options. We've been looking into potentially using fixed optical encoders or shaft encoders in order to measure rotations on an axle, but they're just so darn expensive to get any that would hold up to a several-hundred RPM shaft.

I completely understand why we're using gear tooth sensors, but have other teams experimented with other mechanisms for reliably measuring wheel rotation that doesn't break the bank?

-Danny