Introduction: Quick and Dirty Encoder
Materials used
- Optical slotted switch
- cardboard
- hotglue
- Pencil
- Ruler
- Compass (the one you draw circles)
- Sharp craft knife
- paper (for calculating)
- hotglue gun
Step 1: Planning
so from my measurements, i needed the disc to be slightly less than 1 cm radius and i will cut the slots at 3mm intervals
working that out, i figured i need to spacing to be 18 degrees for each 'tick'.
Step 2: The Disc
An inner circle of smaller diameter is drawn to produce a dart-board-like pattern.
Next darken alternate 'ticks' so you can have an idea how it looks like when it is done, you want to make sure you don't end up with 2 'ticks' forced together. Generally you would want to have an even number of lines fanning out from the center.
Then proceed to cut out the darkened parts
Step 3: Attaching to Motor
depending on the material and tools you use as well as your crafting skills, hopefully your disc would not be as 'fuzzy' as mine.
Step 4: Glue and Use
if you are using arduino, you can wire it as you would with a button and test it out with the button or debouncing example program
Thats it!
Please leave any comment (preferably constructive ones )
Step 5: Update* New Encoder Disc
Here you can see various attempts to upgrade the encoder disc to make it more reliable and provide a higher resolution.
The few discs in the first picture (white background) are all hand made, topmost from cardboard as in this ible, 2nd from a flatten aluminum drink can and the other 3 from aluminum sheet. The problem however was that it is quite difficult to make the slits using the tools available to me and my lack of skills. Hence the disc were quite irregular, still usable but not consistent.
The 3 discs in the second picture (black background) are machine made courtesy of a friend of mine, I believe it is made with a wire cut machine. Works like a dream.
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