New to forum and home machining

Hi Tony welcome to the site, friends hang around here , no wrong questions exist. We help.
 
Thanks for the warm welcome everyone. I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for the machine to arrive. Thank goodness though for 2 day delivery from Amazon...lots of tooling and such on the way to organize in the meantime. :)
 
Hello Tony, I am a keen Arduino fan they are such a versatile and relatively simple to understand platform. My latest project using an Arduino Pro Mini is a DRO on my antique lathe's cross-slide. It is made from a cheap Chinese digital vernier caliper and displays in metric and imperial on a 16X2 LCD screen. I have found it surprisingly accurate and a Godsend on a lathe with as much backlash as mine :dejected:. I think all included it priced at about £25.00, which is a lot cheaper than a bought one. I am adding a tachometer to it at the moment when I have time, got a couple of glitches in the programming.... and I suspect intermittent electrical noise problems. I have got all parts together for 3 axis DRO on my mill. Too many projects not enough time :boxed in:
 
Nice project JC. Question...how did you pick up the signal off the caliper? Did it require any conditioning before sending it to the Arduino, which I'm assuming you've got programmed as a counter?
 
A lot of digital vernier calipers have a little socket under a cover to plug into a computer. These are usually 4 wire, the correct plugs appear to be unobtainable so take caliper apart and solder direct onto the connector pads. There is a lot of information on the internet with complete instructions and even Arduino programmes, (sketch) to read output. I basically used one of these programmers but altered it a bit to do what I wanted. One interesting thing we found was that the on/off switch on these calipers only turns off the display NOT the whole caliper. That explains why if you haven't used caliper for a while you may find battery flat. DRO is powered (1.4v) into "plug" no battery.
Tacho reads the impulses from an infrared transmitter/receiver LED. That part I had already done as a tacho for my old diesel camper-van.
I will look up some articles and post the URLs hopefully tomorrow
 
I have downloaded a pdf file to download forum that shows my "Simple Single Axis DRO" Hope this will be of interest to someone...:cower:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top