Searching for sensors

[Adam Y.]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

I should have been more clear, I dont like them for sensing position of a system that has slip. My issue with them was that our drive system had this knack for accelerating quickly and the wheels slipped occasionally. This meant that our robot thought it was further than it was.That being said, I would use these if I needed to know how fast a gear was spinning due to them being a no contact sensor. Mounting an encoder would mean that the encoder shaft would be spinning at High RPM which causes wear and the potential to have them wear out. In short, it depends on your use.

That isn't a problem with the sensor more than it is bad engineering to try and use the gear tooth sensor in that manner. If you want to reliably measure the distance between a goal and the robot you have to use a sensor like ultrasonic.
Also, you typically mount an encoder in a way to reduce the number of RPMs it rotates.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Adam Y.

That isn't a problem with the sensor more than it is bad engineering to try and use the gear tooth sensor in that manner. If you want to reliably measure the distance between a goal and the robot you have to use a sensor like ultrasonic.
Also, you typically mount an encoder in a way to reduce the number of RPMs it rotates.

Yes it was bad engineering. The goal was to tell us position on the field not distances. To give us range I would have used ultrasonic sensors.

Yes, mounting an encoder so that it gets the least RPMs is a good idea but sometimes even that is a high number. Say, for shooter wheels in 2006. Yes an encoder could tell you the speed but running constantly at high RPMs just doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

[JesseK]

I vote for sticky in the electrical forums. This thread is similar to the mechanical forums thread for suppliers, and its posts have already produced great links.

[samir13k]

1501 uses gyros from sparkfun.com...so far they have seemed to have held up/performed pretty well. (Hint: mount them in silly putty ...it is a shock absorber, and is not a conductor)