# Pinouts for the glass scale board (for dummies)



## tobnpr (May 11, 2020)

I'm probably in over my head, but...
Glass scales on order from Ebay- I've looked at a thread below and documentation, but how do I know which pins on the 9-pin scale connectors correlate to "what" on the board?
Seems if there were a "standard", they'd already be made up that way on the board. So how's an electronics idiot supposed to know how to make up these connections?

Just used an igaging board on one machine that was a cakewalk- but no clue on how to wire the connectors for the glass scales.  How's this done?


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## donthack (Jul 22, 2020)

Wishing there was more to this thread, something I am interested in doing myself.


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## ycroosh (Jul 22, 2020)

Well, the problem is there is no standard. Compounding the problem is the fact that Chinese sellers often have incorrect information (I've seen more than once that the docs they provide are completely wrong). Last three scales I ordered for myself I had to probe the pins to figure out the pinout. 
I have an oscilloscope, so it's pretty easy to do, but let me see if I can come up with a way that uses a simple multimeter.
Regards
Yuriy


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## donthack (Aug 28, 2020)

if I had access to an oscilloscope how would I go about probing to figure out what goes to what?  I have a friend how is a electronics shop teacher[retired].


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## ttabbal (Aug 28, 2020)

donthack said:


> if I had access to an oscilloscope how would I go about probing to figure out what goes to what?  I have a friend how is a electronics shop teacher[retired].




Give him this page.. 






						Connecting Glass DRO Scales to The Controller
					

Blog dedicated to DIY digital readout TouchDRO and other hobby machining and engineering subjects.




					www.yuriystoys.com
				



.

And whatever information you can get from the manufacturer. The most important ones to figure out ahead of time would be power and ground. The others you can use a scope or logic analyzer to get the signals and see which is which. If you have the matching display unit, you could probe that to get the power and ground, or even just look at the PCB, it's often written on them. The read head on the scales is harder to see things like that as it's much smaller. 

For those that want to get tools to probe yourself, one option might be the cheap USB logic analyzers on ebay. <$20 and more than fast enough for these.


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## donthack (Aug 28, 2020)

Thanks for the response TTabbal very helphfull!


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## ycroosh (Oct 6, 2020)

This is a bit late, but I finally got around to writing instructions on how to reverse-engineer the pinout of Chinese glass DRO scales. Hopefully it will be useful for some people going forward: How to Find Glass DRO Scale Pin Functions


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