Triode
Well-Known Member
I'm working on a paid project for a professor, but this isn't for a grade so you aren't helping me with a school assignment. It's to test his composite bike forks. I have load cells to measure the force, but I need a really high accuracy way to measure displacement and capture it with windaq and a DAQ kit. A good target would be +/- 5 thousandths of an inch at 30 samples per second. here's some options I'm thinking of, if anyone can add to them or give me more options please do:
1.There are those graduated capacitive strips they use in digital calipers, I'm not sure how reasonable they are to buy. I was thinking, they have $20 digital calipers that offer the accuracy I need, but is there any reasonable hope of modifying one to be captured? I suppose the easy and dirty way would be to take the LCD lines and program a PIC to decode them back into numbers, but that would be slow.
2.Just get a really reliable slide pot, or set up a very reliable rotary pot with linear motion rigging.
3.Graduated optical tracking like they use in printers.
as a side note, I'm a mechanical engineering student who knows some about robotics (pic programming, motor control, PC programming), but I'm by no means an electronics expert. I've got the mechanical testing table and most of the electronics covered, but the positional part is going to require some stuff I haven't done before. That's why I'm seeking a bit of advice on where to start from some people who may have done electronic position measurement at high accuracy.
1.There are those graduated capacitive strips they use in digital calipers, I'm not sure how reasonable they are to buy. I was thinking, they have $20 digital calipers that offer the accuracy I need, but is there any reasonable hope of modifying one to be captured? I suppose the easy and dirty way would be to take the LCD lines and program a PIC to decode them back into numbers, but that would be slow.
2.Just get a really reliable slide pot, or set up a very reliable rotary pot with linear motion rigging.
3.Graduated optical tracking like they use in printers.
as a side note, I'm a mechanical engineering student who knows some about robotics (pic programming, motor control, PC programming), but I'm by no means an electronics expert. I've got the mechanical testing table and most of the electronics covered, but the positional part is going to require some stuff I haven't done before. That's why I'm seeking a bit of advice on where to start from some people who may have done electronic position measurement at high accuracy.