After subscribing to Make magazine I got the electronics bug again (way back when I was an EE guy) and picked up an Arduino which is a really fun little micro controller.
My project idea is to hook an optical mouse sensor and an lcd up to it and then attach it to my table saw fence to give me a digital read out of the cut width. The fanciest mice have a resolution of 6000dpi, which translates to 0.04mm which is crazy accurate… So far I have the LCD part of the equation working so all I have to do now is hook up the mouse.
Be careful on repeatability. I’ve tried to use optical mouse electronics as part of a rotary encoder before, and it seemed amazingly sensitive, but was awful for “turn right n steps, now turn left n steps”, and I gave it up for a basic quad encoder.
See this post :)
Aha! Missed that one when I was going back through your RSS feed…
The microcontrollers I’ve been playing with recently, the Atmel AVR line, have a bunch of 10 bit A/D converters on ‘em for free, so I’ve been wanting to get my hands on a couple of sine encoders (rather than straight digital quad encoders) and see how accurately I can use a cheap encoder like that.
But I’m also a Vernier caliper kind of guy, haven’t yet worked my way up to these newfangled digital thingies, so I haven’t been motivated to play with a lot of these things outside of work.