Touch DRO and Bluetooth BLE

[julian]

Hi,

I'm trying to connect an Arduino MKR 1010 board to Touch DRO.

The description for the Arduino MKR 1010 board is rather misleading in that it's described as offering Bluetooth and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy).  Having bought the board it turns out that it only supports BLE.  The tablet on which Touch DRO is running supports BLE.  So, the question is ... will Touch DRO operate with BLE?

I know it's possible to to do some pretty complicated modifications to the chips on the MKR 1010 board to get it to run "Classic" Bluetooth, but I'd like to try and use a standard Arduino board if possible.

Thanks in advance for any assistance on this subject.

[Yuriy]

Hi,
the app works only with BT classic. I will add BLE in the future, but it will be custom GATT and won't work with generic BLE adapters. In either case, you should really use LaunchPad for TouchDRO. I stopped maintaining Arduino sketch many years ago, and the guy that took over (Rysiu M/) appears to have stopped a few years back as well. LaunchPad based firmware is newer, better, and more robust and the circuit works better with iGaging scales anyway.
If you are designing something from scratch, ignore all this, obviously.
Regards
Yuriy

[julian]

Hi Yuriy,

Thanks for the prompt reply.

Yes, I am trying to do something sort of from scratch. It’s in collaboration with a good friend, Mark who’s the software brains behind the project, while I concentrate on the nuts and bolts. We’ve collaborated previously on a project to replace drip feed oilers … https://groups.io/g/digitalhobbyist/message/1628 and Mark was an immense help tracking down spurious readings from encoders when I was implementing Jon Bryan’s excellent electronic lead screw project … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKKs4lCEXwE&t=3s , writing sketches that monitored signals from the encoder and flagged up discrepancies.

I fitted Touch DRO to my mill back in the days when you were supporting Arduino and I have to say it transformed the machine, so can I take this belated opportunity to say a big thank you for so generously sharing a fantastic project.

Since fitting out the mill I’ve hankered after fitting a DRO to my lathe, but I could never figure out an elegant way of installing liner scales that didn’t interfere with the normal operation of the machine. In addition I didn’t like the idea of cables hanging off the back of the machine, collecting chips and oil.

So I’ve been thinking around a completely wireless system. This would require both the X and Z axis sensors to be mounted on the back of the saddle in an enclosure which also contains the microprocessor and a battery. From there the BT signal sends to the tablet running Touch DRO … no external wires.

We started looking at the Arduino as it offered battery charging, had a small foot print and with a low current draw seemed to be intended for this type of application.

Mechanically the current thinking is to use stainless steel draw wires and rotary encoders as the scales facilitating both sensors being in the same location. I know there will be many issues to overcome with this design but if it works it should offer a low cost alternative to bulky liner scales. Currently the mechanical parts I need to make a prototype are on a slow boat from China. Mark has written several sketches already which work fine in principal but we’re stuck with this BT issue. He’s got a good way into re -programming the Arduino chips to run classic BT, but isn’t quite there yet.

Would LaunchPad be suitable for this application?

If we can get a practical, accurate and repeatable system working I’d be happy to post our results if it would be of interest to others.