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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>
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