TouchDRO Issues

[MilesW]

I have 2 issues with my TouchDRO 3 axis mill system.
When I last zeroed the Z axis, now the readout does not change from zeros no matter what I attempt. I tried changing up the input cables and the Z axis scale provides data through the other axis data ports. The scales are Igaging. Is it me or does the board need replacing. It is not very old and not used a lot.

The 2nd issues is that on the Y axis I get some random readout issue. I will be moving the axis and the readout will jump .200”! This readout error stays and doesn’t reset. Not good. Is that an issue with the scale?

Very troublesome issues.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks
Miles

 

[ycroosh]

I have 2 issues with my TouchDRO 3 axis mill system.
When I last zeroed the Z axis, now the readout does not change from zeros no matter what I attempt. I tried changing up the input cables and the Z axis scale provides data through the other axis data ports. The scales are Igaging. Is it me or does the board need replacing. It is not very old and not used a lot.

The 2nd issues is that on the Y axis I get some random readout issue. I will be moving the axis and the readout will jump .200”! This readout error stays and doesn’t reset. Not good. Is that an issue with the scale?

Very troublesome issues.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks
Miles

MIles,
Zeroing out the readout in the app can't mess with the scale, so that was probably a coincidence. The problem (based on your description) sounds like a connection issue (Z input is not working). It could be a mechanical problem (USB port has a cracked solder joint) or electrical (the input burned out). In either case this sounds like an adapter issue. If you purchased it from me, please email me at yuriy at toucdro dot com and we can go from there.

The second issue is the infamous .200 jump. This is a scale problem. Some older revisions of iGaging scales had this problem; I haven't heard of this happening with newer scales. Sometimes rotating the reading head by 180 degrees solves this, although I have no idea how.
The gist of it is that 0.200 is exactly 512 encoder count, which is also a power of 2. The scales use binary protocol (0s and 1s), 512 in binary is 1000000000. The jump happens when the scale flips that bit from 0 to 1 or vice versa. I suspect this is either a "trick" or a bug that iGaging knew about (or did intentionally), since their display hides it (I was able to reproduce this, and even though I see the glitch on the oscilloscope, the display kept showing the position as if nothing happened). In TouchDRO is don't do any of this, since I don't know what scales are connected, so you see it on screen.

Regards
Yuriy