DIY DRO!

[MyLilMule]

A friend of mine, Stefano Bertelli, has been working on a DRO based on a Raspberry PI microcomputer and a couple of circuit boards. He's made all of it open sourced, which means it is free to use. Even the circuit designs are available and you can either make your own board or get them premade from him. I've started to assemble a version of it myself and have it working on the table axis of my K&T 2HL horizontal mill. I'll be adding the saddle and knee scales soon. After that, a stepper motor or a servo motor to drive a dividing head!

 

[WobblyHand]

Nice work. I incorporated a DRO into my ELS. Not as fancy as above, but it's all that I could fit in the display (with everything else) and remain readable. The graphics always gave me trouble.

 

[MyLilMule]

Nice. YouTuber Jeremy Make Things used one of these DROs as an ELS on his lathe. One thing he did that I never thought of was he used it as an electronic taper attachment, too. He switched the feed lever to his cross slide and used the DR DRO to move the cross slide in sync with the Z axis. And then just moved the carriage by hand. I think it took some calculations to make it work, not ideal, but it did work. I thought it was pretty ingenious. I think if you moved the servo to direct drive the cross feed screw insead of the lead screw, it would definitely work as an electronic taper attachment. Add in a second servo output to the DRO wouldn't be too difficult.

 

[RJSakowski]

Nice. YouTuber Jeremy Make Things used one of these DROs as an ELS on his lathe. One thing he did that I never thought of was he used it as an electronic taper attachment, too. He switched the feed lever to his cross slide and used the DR DRO to move the cross slide in sync with the Z axis. And then just moved the carriage by hand. I think it took some calculations to make it work, not ideal, but it did work. I thought it was pretty ingenious. I think if you moved the servo to direct drive the cross feed screw insead of the lead screw, it would definitely work as an electronic taper attachment. Add in a second servo output to the DRO wouldn't be too difficult.

An interesting thought. Here is another approach. It wouldn't take too much modification to read the cross slide counts and use that output instead of the spindle to drive the lead screw. In that case, the master would be the cross slide and the slave would be the lead screw. There would be some software needed to set the ratio of x axis counts to driver pulses for my lead screw stepper. @WobblyHand, you probably have most of what is needed in your ELS/DRO already. A step even further would be to set up additional math functions to turn a ball or other complex shape.