I hate to be that guy who was just touting his DRO setup on another thread only to turn on said DRO and have it not work. But that is where we are at today.
I went to do some work on the mill and noticed I had left the DRO powered up for who knows how long now. Didn't think much of it until I was trying find the edge of my work piece and noticed that the DRO display was not moving when I turned the wheels. Not only on a single axis but it was intermittently not working on all 3 axis. I did some basic checks, the scales are getting the required 5 volts, everything is clean inside the scales. I tried someones suggestion of "tightening the spring" to force the read head down on glass scale. This helped a bit but was not 100%. There is a read LED that blinks on the the MSP430 when this happens but that is not always the case either.
Here is my setup. I am using Touch DRO with a MSP430 Launchpad controller and a custom voltage shift circuit modeled off of Yuri's X3 build here. This is all for 3 Ditron glass scales, DC10 models.
Here are videos of two of the read heads and what is going on:
Just some back info is the problem arises when I move the head ever so slightly and run it the length of the scale. I get the most consistent results when the reader is flush on the scale. But it will eventually glitch out. When the reader is pulled as far from the head as it can be and run the length of the scale it almost never works. (While watching inside the scale while I move the outer portion of the read head I cannot see any visible movement of the internal read head).
My theory is that I have a short in the wires going into the scale pictured below For one this seems like a classic short where the DRO stops receiving signal. Second I moved the wires from the way they are pictured here to have the S bend on the far side of the head. This caused the scale to stop working altogether. What makes me think that it is not a short is that I would be amazed if all the scales went out at the exact same time. So that means maybe I blew out the controller in my DRO or maybe the heads are not sitting dead on right (we have had one hell of a heat wave lately and while in a cool garage the temp has been up, maybe the spring weakened).
Given my limited amount of tools for diagnosing this issue (multi meter and no replacement DRO or scales) anyone have any ideas? Anyone in my area want to let me plug some scales into their DRO and let me rule out them as the issue?
I went to do some work on the mill and noticed I had left the DRO powered up for who knows how long now. Didn't think much of it until I was trying find the edge of my work piece and noticed that the DRO display was not moving when I turned the wheels. Not only on a single axis but it was intermittently not working on all 3 axis. I did some basic checks, the scales are getting the required 5 volts, everything is clean inside the scales. I tried someones suggestion of "tightening the spring" to force the read head down on glass scale. This helped a bit but was not 100%. There is a read LED that blinks on the the MSP430 when this happens but that is not always the case either.
Here is my setup. I am using Touch DRO with a MSP430 Launchpad controller and a custom voltage shift circuit modeled off of Yuri's X3 build here. This is all for 3 Ditron glass scales, DC10 models.
Here are videos of two of the read heads and what is going on:
Just some back info is the problem arises when I move the head ever so slightly and run it the length of the scale. I get the most consistent results when the reader is flush on the scale. But it will eventually glitch out. When the reader is pulled as far from the head as it can be and run the length of the scale it almost never works. (While watching inside the scale while I move the outer portion of the read head I cannot see any visible movement of the internal read head).
My theory is that I have a short in the wires going into the scale pictured below For one this seems like a classic short where the DRO stops receiving signal. Second I moved the wires from the way they are pictured here to have the S bend on the far side of the head. This caused the scale to stop working altogether. What makes me think that it is not a short is that I would be amazed if all the scales went out at the exact same time. So that means maybe I blew out the controller in my DRO or maybe the heads are not sitting dead on right (we have had one hell of a heat wave lately and while in a cool garage the temp has been up, maybe the spring weakened).
Given my limited amount of tools for diagnosing this issue (multi meter and no replacement DRO or scales) anyone have any ideas? Anyone in my area want to let me plug some scales into their DRO and let me rule out them as the issue?