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Project Help and Ideas » Digital Caliper video

February 18, 2010
by mcai8sh4
mcai8sh4's Avatar

Mike and Humberto - once again you have excelled yourselves with this new tutorial.

I do a lot of work on lathes (both center and CNC) and milling machines. So I was really excited to see your new tutorial. With the added bonus, I have a small hobby lathe that I (eventually) wanted to add a DRO onto, with this new information, I may be able to speed up this project!

As a side note, when you are milling, generally you would touch on the top of the work piece, set the readout to zero, then down is -ve and up is +ve (you video shows the opposite).

Truly great work - I'm going to have to dig out a few of my old calipers and see if I can sort out the x and y axis.

Thanks again.

February 19, 2010
by JKITSON
JKITSON's Avatar

Mike and Humberto.....

Wow fantastic idea and starter for me. I own two Smithy setups. One I use as a lathe only. The second one is setup as a mill.. I have a third one as spare parts. Will be watching for more ideas and will experiment on my own here...

Thanks again.. Jim

February 23, 2010
by mrobbins
(NerdKits Staff)

mrobbins's Avatar

Thanks guys -- we'll be working on the X and Y axes soon on this end. Those have some more mechanical complexity (and we've got to make some holes in our machine), but also have quite a bit more complexity in the code. Right now, since we're only reading from one axis, we can just use delays and busy loops just waiting for a clock line to change. But when we have three axes (or more -- compound, tailstock??), each individual caliper can broadcast its data at any time, so we'll have to use interrupts and make things much more interesting!

Mike

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