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Welcome to the home page of quadwheel, the encoder wheel creation tool.
Do you need to know the speed and direction of rotation of a shaft? possibly to be read by a computer?
Possibly you are working on a robotics project? or a CNC conversion? or
building the next mars rover?
What ever the reason, if you need a home-brew quadrature encoder, this is
for you.
Just edit the wheel specs in the top of this postscript file using a plain
text editor (NOT a word proccessor!) and then save and print it. When it is
correct, print it on a clear transparency or window decal stock.
Cut this out and affix it to a hub on your shaft and add some electronics
to read it. That is it.
Does the word 'electronics' scare you? no need.
All you need are some optical components scrapped from an old ball mouse or
purchased at a local electronics surplus store.
As this project is currently done, the only future development might be to create some sort of GUI front end for it. However that would be a lot of work considering how trivial it is to hand edit the file anyway.
So the only things I will probably do, are to add some detailed case studies of encoders I've made, the first of these could be forthcoming in the next few days.
Just added, a page about the encoder for the rotary table that got this project started. (See side menu.)
There does appear to be a small snag with printing wheels, that of getting the ink thick enough to block the light. Apparently this is going to require printing several wheels and layering them. Some alignment marks outside of the wheel area will be added to the program soon in order to make alignment of the layers easier. If anyone knows how to get the wheels to print really black, please let me know, full bleed looks black, until it is held up to a light, at which point it looks gray, too thin.