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This came about as I am doing a CNC conversion on a manual bench top milling machine and I'm too cheap to buy encoders. I had the idea to scrap a ball mouse for it's encoders, and in fact did use one, including the plastic wheel, on the rotary table (4th axis), however the small size of the plastic wheels was a bit limiting. I had purchased DC servos on ebay for the X, Y, and Z axises, but the encoder on one of them was no good. Also I needed an encoder on the spindle. Then I had the idea to print the wheels on plastic, affix that to custom hubs, and use the optics from a mouse.
How to print a nice wheel though? I went searching... and found an example of a home brew encoder.

It was OK, but not quite what was needed, but it was a starting point. As it was a postscript file, I had to learn some postscript, not hard really, it only took me two days to learn enough to be affective.

At this point quadwheel is almost a complete rewrite from that original example, there are very few lines left that clearly go back to the original code.

Comments or questions? drop me an email.

Make it a great day

Terry Mackintosh <terry@mackintoshweb.com>