Machsupport Forum
Mach Discussion => General Mach Discussion => Topic started by: Gropper on September 13, 2012, 05:33:58 PM
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Hello,
Almost all of the small digital Verniers and DROs comming from China these days have a little data slot on them, where one can connect a
serial cable and in this way communicate between the measuring device and a Personal Computer. Now.... in the last five years I have
been looking for a seller of these cables, (especially the cables to the verniers) but no one seem to have them for sale.....
Do you know where one can buy them........ ?
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I have not seen such things for sale, however I have poked around at my little cheapie digital caliper, and found you can interface the data signal using a basic stamp, propeller chip, or arduino, and these can interface with a PC. It may not be a clean and polished solution though. One thing to note: as far as I know, if you intend to somehow use that data with mach3, you can only send serial data from within mach3, not receive. If this is not true, I'd love to be corrected.
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Hi Zaaephod :
I once saw a German guy selling such a 5 line display able to show 5 axes
but the price tag was totally unacceptable to me at the time, ( more than $ 300 )
but one could interface all the no name verniers or most of them. No I don’t plan
to import the data into Mach3, but it would be great to have such a gizmo for the
various occasions where I do manual work on my mill. I have a couple of Arduino Nano
somewhere, did you se a layout on how to interface those Chinese no name verniers
on the Arduino website ?
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Not for the arduino specifically, I was working with a propeller, but if you're familiar with the arduino platform, the links below should point you in the right direction.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Reading-Digital-Callipers-with-an-Arduino-USB/
http://robocombo.blogspot.com/2010/12/using-tis-launchpad-to-interface.html
Also, parallax makes some really nice lcd screens that are super easy to interface using a propeller. There may be something like this for arduino as well.
http://www.parallax.com/Store/Accessories/Displays/tabid/159/List/0/ProductID/51/Default.aspx?SortField=ProductName%2cProductName
Hope this helps :)
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Really great link.... Thanks