Monday, February 6, 2012

aBot – Break Beam Wheel Encoder

The two analog wheel encoder designs I have been working with don’t have the level of simplicity I was hoping for.  As a result I have decided to try an all digital design that makes use of a break beam sensor.  The break beam design means developing a move complicated encoder disk but greatly simplifies the electronics.

The core of this design is a Rohm Semiconductor RPI-352 Photointerrupter.  In the picture below you can see the physical setup. 

RobotEncoderV4RobotEncoderV4-3
The photointerrupter is connected using double sided tape to a piece of perfboard that has been fashioned into an L.  The perfboard is connected to the aBot frame.  The photointerrupter straddles a plastic disk which has holes punched through it.

The leads from the photointerrupter are then connected to pins 2 and 3 on the boardino.

RobotEncoderV4-2
Over the next couple of weeks I will work on getting the software setup.

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