[BillTodd]

Continued from Welcome thread

Look like you haave been busy. The engraver looks great.

Thanks

I would be interested in how you used the PICs for your DRO`s. Did you design them yourself?
I wonder if they could work using encoders ?

Mario

The DRO (still work in progress) uses one 12F675 per channel to read the digital scale. The outputs of four PIC are multiplexed into one serial port of a PC. The PC runs a VB5 application that displays the readings (see attached).

The layout of the main form is designed to match my homebrew PC's touchswitches that are arranged down the left and right sides of the display

I spent sometime getting every thing to talk to each other neatly, so for instance, you can plug an extra vernier/scale into the adapter block and it just pops up on the screen.

As to using the PICs with quadrature encoder, I'm sure the little 8 pinners I've used lack the necessary hardware (you'd need a couple of fast counters to ensure no pulses were lost). The ones to use would be the dsPIC devices like the 30F4012 (?) which have the quadrature hardware inside.