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    Member NT4Boy's Avatar
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    Default YaDRO 2021

    Back in 2006 ish, Nick Müller came up with his version a DRO from Chinese scales, and called it Yet Another DRO, YaDRO.

    He marketed it through I believe three sellers.
    Hobbymetrix in US/Canada
    RA Bell Instruments in NewZealand/Australia
    L S Caine Electronic Services in the UK.
    I bought one of the kits from LS Caine, and have used it on my Mill and Lathe, pretty much on a weekly basis ever since. The kit was for an electronic interface between up to 4 scales in a small box. It also contained a PCB plus all the necessary components to populate the board including a ready programmed Atmel Tiny Micrprocessor. The box also contained a serial socket and was intended to be connected to a serial port on a Laptop.
    His website contained all you could ever need to know about the design of the system as well as instructions for building the kit. To use it, you downloaded a DOS 6.22 application that was not intended to work in a Windows box. He was quite clear that this was designed to run on old laptops on old fashion DOS.
    There were some gotchas mainly because the scales were 1.5-volt button cell things, now powered from the interface, and you need to solder the interface wires directly to the scale PCB to ensure consistent connections. Also, the 1.5-volt power rail in the interface comes up quite slowly in my original build, and that confused some scales and they didn’t start cleanly every time. I finally fixed this with putting a time delayed relay internally that allows the interface to settle for a few seconds after power up before connecting the 1.5 volts to the scales.
    I have sold on my mill, and the YaDRO with it and pondered for a while on how to add another DRO to my lathe. What I really wanted, was to build another YaDRO kit, but as the sellers are no longer in business seemed out of the question. To be honest I looked at some of the newer versions and realised I could use maybe better glass scales and a more powerful and modern PC or even Android tablet or even those with purpose-built panels. Trouble is, I like the feel YaDRO PC side of things and the options for edge finding and the fact that the thing boots in seconds and has HUGE numbers anyone can see from across the workshop.
    So how hard could it be to make a copy of the interface myself?
    Not simples, simple, but an interesting project. I have used Nick’s original electronic schematic, and designed a new PCB using opensource KiCad. I’d never used it before, but it worked well for me. On this new board, I laid everything out as closely to his original design as I could. I added another PCB for the delay timer and somewhat to my surprise, not being an electrical engineer, after rounding up all the necessary components, have ended up with a reasonable looking clone that works.


    As a bonus, I’ve four superfluous YaDRO PCB’s sets.
    If anyone else is as mad as I and feels they might like to build one for themselves, some things to bear in mind.
    This interface is for the 1.5volt scales only, might work with the 3.0 volt ones but would need some fiddling by someone knowledgeable, not I, to establish that.
    You will need an old laptop with a serial port. These are getting to be known as Vintage now, so their prices are rising, bizarrely.
    The RS232 chip is specified as being a MAX3232CPE. Some of those sold on ebay, won’t work at 5 volts as they should, and I got caught out with this thing that got so hot it burned my finger.. Suggest for this one chip, you bite the bullet and buy it from RS components or another reputable source.
    Lastly, Nick’s website yadro.de*-&nbspyadro Resources and Information. is obviously no longer up. But I do have a localised copy I can put on Dropbox, along with some photos of the inside of the box and a parts list, if anyone is that fired up. The original site has the instructions, the DOS software and the code that will need burning onto the Atmel processor.
    The kits cost around £80 to gather up all the components, hardware, wire crimps etc etc. less the boards.
    I’m happy for a PCB board set to go for £15.
    I guess I’d put them on ebay, and paste a link here if anyone is interested enough and if that’s allowed.

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