Encoder for digital readout on bender?

[Pook]

Hi everyone I'm new

I am a ticketed industrial electrician, but have been out the game for 5 years now chasing the dream of selfemploment doing custom fabrication work, so I don't mind wiring and hooking stuff up like plc's and various control stuff and sensors etc. I just never get really into were to buy stuff because all that work was done by others, I just hooked it up.

I would like to setup a digital encoder and readout for my homebuilt JD2 style hydraulic bender.

I initially would like to have just digital readout of 180 deg rotoation, if I had to zero it out everytime I start thats fine for now, but would eventually like to set it up with programable stops numbers for repeatablity.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for online parts purchases etc and what kind of componets I should be looking for to be able to do this.

I'm trying to get ahold of an old friend of my dad's who's into controls for some tips but he's out of town at the moment and have no idea when he'll be back and I;m getting itchy to get going on this product since I am purchasing the bendtech bending software in the next couple days.

[keebler303]

these guys have the right idea.

You may want to look into some simple PIC microcontroller programming. Many pic micros can handle encoder inputs and you could program it to do most anything you wanted. The display would be fairly straight forward as described in the thread below. Stopping at the commanded angle would be a lot more complex using discrete components. Someone with some pic programming experience could probably knock this out in an hour or so. I have just started getting into pic chips and I can think of how it would be not but I'm not sure if I have the experience to actually do it. If you're interested in diving into something like this I would be interested in helping out as I plan to eventually make a bender to fuel my jeep projects.

digital readout for bender...

Matt

[HillBilly]

I have used this US Digital readout (see .pdf) for simple readout applications. It has a relay output ,set points and also can be used as a tach.

http://www.artsoftcontrols.com/forum...p?topic=2379.0
This is a link to a a guy that set Mach3 CNC software up for a automatic bender. As a plus you can download the DEMO version of the software and actually play around with it.

Darek

[Warpspeed]

Pook, it depends on how sophisticated, accurate, and expensive you want it to be.

Definitely the cheapest and simplest is to just mechanically couple up a good quality potentiometer to a digital voltmeter. Arrange it so that 180 degrees of shaft rotation is exactly 1.800 volts. Usually you can adjust where the decimal point is, so it digitally reads 000.0 to 180.0

Not very elegant, but it would be the lowest cost digital readout possible.

Next step up would be an optical shaft encoder with 360 pulses per revolution, and a digital up down counter. The counter could be something in hardware, or a microcontroller of some type. If you can write your own software for it, it could do anything you want it to do.

Top of the range would be a commercial store bought off the shelf system.

How deep are your pockets ?