that uC works great with two rechargeable AA batteries @ 2.4V, datasheet says 1.8V minimum.

$7 is a nice price for those i can only find one for $12.

now pair it with a laser.

Nice link Kris.

They have a iPod DRO. That looks slick. It would probably look really nice with a larger screen. Like the colour nook, or any android tablet.

http://www.msh-tools.com/DRO/ipprg.html

Please tell me I’m not the only person who read the title as Reading a digital caliper with a micrometer

Glad you like it! I have the link in my article to guy I bought it from for 7$ including slow shipping (I have no connection to him whatsoever). Others where closer to 10$ as you say.

Yeah, you could pair couple of those with miling machine and make small CNC type of thing. My initial idea was to use it as position sensor for motocycle suspesion data loging, but 8 times a second won’t be enough for that.

@sdmadsen
NO! I read it once , thought about it, and thought reading a digital caliper digitally. And thought well gee thats dumb just look at the lcd. Then the second time I realized what they meant.

@Maris:

If you need more speed, try this: give up on the SPC data interface and get the encoder signals directly. I suggest you try to find them, not at the pickup or read head, but after a stage of amplification. You’re looking for a pair of square waves in quadrature (90 deg. apart in phase).

Since the signals would probably not be CMOS- or TTL-compatible, you might have to buffer them up with a couple of transistors.

Your Launchpad should be plenty quick enough to keep up with the count at the rate your bike suspension will move.

I’ve done a couple of projects with microcontrollers reading and doing math on encoder outputs. If you should need a little insight, feel free to ask.

@gyro_john

You mean to read directly before that small caliper mcu, like directly those capacitance sensors? Yeah, that sounds interesting… but as you say I’m not sure how much “energy” those signals would have… If you have any more pointers/links, feel free to send them my way. If that works out, could be nice topic for another article :)

Oh hell yes! I’ve been wondering how to interface with the port on my digital caliper (Same as pictured) and I have three Launchpads I’ve barely touched! :3

@Maris:

I e-mailed you a rather long thing of my comments on how to parse the two square waves – I thought it too long to post here. Sorry everybody; I don’t have a good place where I can leave it forever.

However I thought that two other comments might be of interest:

1. As to low-energy signals, let me suggest that I would connect them to the gates of FETs, then the loading would be very small.

2. Here’s a new idea I just had this week to get a longer linear encoder from cheap calipers. I’m excited to try it. You see I have a very small home milling machine with 14″ X-axis travel, so no cheap caliper will have a long enough stroke. Here’s my idea: I chain two of them together in series. They will both extend and collapse randomly together. Since we now know how to do conversion math on the square wave inputs, I run the outputs of BOTH calipers to my conversion circuit and output equivalent A, Abar, B and Bbar signals equivalent to the sum of what the two calipers are doing.

Happy Holidays, all.

Hi, Im doing a project also using a digital caliper, what type of caliper would you surgest using, I will also pickup the signal, (the data stream) to fead into my own circuit, and where can I find the type of protocols they use?

Thanx Marinus