DRO

[Ken_Shea]

As I was moving my optical mouse around I thought, this would make a great dirt cheap DRO for a lathe, I could make millions . Now the whole world will know about my new idea.

It was a very simple matter of writing a little VB code to track the movement in X and Y and it could be easily be coded for onscreen selection of incremental, absolute, zero etc. All one would have to do is mount a arm to the cross slide to hold the mouse and move it along a plate at the back of the lathe.

Here are some problems with this working acceptably:
1: Movement equates to roughly .003 because the mouse is designed to operate within pixel size, screen resolution and the CPI of the mouse. .003 is not bad but not good enough for machining. This may be overcome by getting a quality mouse with higher CPI (Counts per inch). The Microsoft optical mouse seems to be about 300CPI one with about 1000 CPI would be nice.

2: Limited X and Y movement to the video screen size limit. This is a problem but actually I am hard pressed to recall a time when I was turning over 12" in length on my 13x40 lathe so even this is actually not all that prohibitive.

3: Would require a dedicated computer.

Any ideas on this anyone?

Swede this is right up your ally

Ken

[abasir]

My 2 cents,

1. Although rated at 300cpi, I wonder if it would be realistic. I had to move significant distance (about 0.5mm) before the mouse actually register the move (not sure whether it's hardware or driver limitation).

2. Mouse actually send 'relative move', i.e., how many pulse in x or y since last update. No direct link to screen size.

3. Not necessarily. Mouse communication protocol is almost standard. Simple microcontroller can read the protocol and drive an LCD or LED display.

Like I said, my 2 cents

[Ken_Shea]

Thanks for the reply abasir

The link to screen size is the maximum movement in either X or Y, and this is controlled by the driver. The actual movements between these limits seems to be a combination of video resolution and pixel size all controlled and influenced by the video driver where the limits of these resolutions is controlled by the CPI.

Simple micro controller can read the protocol and drive an LCD or LED display. this is beyond my understanding unfortunately.


Ken

[ToyMaker]

Ken:
Google "mouse hack". There are many folks who have decyphered the mouse internals and posted their results.

robotic regards,

Tom
= = = = =
"She would rather fool with a bee than be with a fool."
- - John Kendrick Bangs

[nesa]

Direct use optical mouse as dro.

Good luck

http://letitbit.net/download/24cef86...o-DRO.rar.html