Reading Digital caliper with Arduino

[chucketn]

(03-12-2015, 05:20 PM)arvidj Wrote: Nice scopes. All I have is a Rigol DS2072 2 channel 160MHz.

I'm a member of the Shumatech DRO Yahoo group and the subject of connectors comes up often. For a number of years the LMS connectors have been the only ones that anyone has been able to find and yes, the price is often a showstopper.

It seems like the most common solution is to dedicate the scale to the DRO by soldering to the scale connector, powering the scale from the DRO, replacing the battery with a pair of capacitors in the battery compartment and then putting what ever kind of connector on the DRO end of the cable that you happen to have in the junk box.

My X2 mill, purchased 2nd hand, came with scales already installed. The original owner had built a Shumatec DRO and kept the DRO, but left the scales installed. that led me to get a Shumatec DRO-550 kit and build it. Wish now I'd bought 2! I used S video cables from other equipment to connect the scales to the DRO-550. The scale heads had cables soldered to the runs in the data port. I cut the S-video cables in half and spliced them to the wires already on the scales, and bought the connectors with the DRO kit.
I also soldered the leads to the caliper I'm trying to read with the Arduino. I have salvaged several PS2 type mouse cords with PS2 connectors, and have several PS2 connectors of the type found in the expansion slots of old computer towers to interface if needed.

Chuck