DRO for Dore Westbury milling machine

John,

It's a bit counter-intuitive, but BlueTooth is actually more resilient to shop noise. There is unlikely to be a piece of equipment that can generate 2.4 GHz interference. USB has a potential of creating a large ground loop that can pick up all sorts of things. More importantly, on the software side BT is implemented on the Android OS level; USB is a custom driver written by "some guy". It works OK on most tablets with many USB-to-serial chips but not all tablets implement the OS side of things in the same way. For instance, I test the app on about doze different tablets: Google Nexus, five different Samsungs, Google Pixel C, Amazon Fire and a few cheap Chinse no-name devices. USB works on all of them, except one of the Chinese tablets crashes if I connect via USB right after the tablet has been disconnected from the charger. There is a version of Asus tablet that is horribly unstable and I still can't figure out why; Lenovo tablets hate this particular USB driver, and so on.

That said, if you live in the part of the world where Amazon ships to, you can get Amazon Fire tablet for $50 (USD) or about 40 quid...

Regards

Yuriy

I have one of Yuriys quadrature encoder interfaces on my Ajax Mill, connecting via bluetooth to a jailbroken kindle HD and running android Kitkat. All works fine with no interference from the 2 inverters that power the mill main and power feed motors.

The setup is a great improvement over my previous setup with a Shumatech DRO350 and QCC100 converters for the glass scales. I still have the dro350 hooked up to a couple of chinese scales but these will soon be replaced with magnetic scales and connected to the touchdro for the Z and W axis

Frances,

I know a number of people who bought the "Digital Readout Bars with Dedicated Remote Display" scales from ArcEuro. iGaging is a California-based distributor that re-barges various scales. The scales in question are made by Shahe and there is no difference between iGaging and the generic version.

Regards

Yuriy