Any way to make a Newall spherosyn adapter

[tomj]

It would be great to be able to use Newall scale/encoders as they are very robust, popular and show up frequently on Ebay, but they use a unique technology:
http://www.newall.com/technology/
There are Newall encoders that are compatible with ttl & quadrature conventions but they are not nearly as common so using the proprietary Newall ones would be great.  Any thoughts?

Tom

[Yuriy]

It would be great to be able to use Newall scale/encoders as they are very robust, popular and show up frequently on Ebay, but they use a unique technology:
http://www.newall.com/technology/
There are Newall encoders that are compatible with ttl & quadrature conventions but they are not nearly as common so using the proprietary Newall ones would be great.  Any thoughts?

Tom

Tom,
Are you talking about scales that output two analog sinusoidal waves that are then interpolated to get the position?
Your best bet for that is to look for a used "interpolation box". I'm not entirely sure, but I was told that those boxes are somewhat compatible between different manufacturers. I.e. might be able to use Heidenhain box with Newall scales.
It's highly unlikely that I will design hardware/firmware for those scales, though. I would take hundreds of hours of work and there aren't enough scales on the market to justify it.

Hope this makes sense.
Thank you
Yuriy

[tomj]

Yes, the sine wave scale encoders, spherosyn SG and microsyn. I THINK the Newall DSG and DMG encoders are the ones that provide ttl or 1vpp are used with just a cable adapter or simple additional power to work with most popular boxes and would probably be easy to connect to your setup, but these DSG and DMGs are not as plentiful as the Spherosyn SG & microsyn scales with the proprietary sine wave output. I just found what I think is a more sophisticated conversion box, see http://www.newall.com/upload/content/fil...nual_2.pdf
that would (Might?) allow use of the SG sine wave encoders. Would this box provide a suitable output to use with your unit?

[Yuriy]

Yes, the sine wave scale encoders, spherosyn SG and microsyn.  I THINK the Newall DSG and DMG encoders are the ones that provide ttl or 1vpp are used with just a cable adapter or simple additional power to work with most popular boxes and would probably be easy to connect to your setup, but these DSG and DMGs are not as plentiful as the Spherosyn SG & microsyn scales with the proprietary sine wave output.  I just found what I think is a more sophisticated conversion box, see http://www.newall.com/upload/content/fil...nual_2.pdf
that would (Might?) allow use of the SG sine wave encoders.  Would this box provide a suitable output to use with your unit?

Tom,
The box provides suitable quadrature output. It looks like it can be configured to output differential or single sided signal. They mention 34C87 chip in the manual, which is a driver that is compatible with the line decoder that the TouchDRO Quadrature controller uses, so you should be fine there. The signal rate looks pretty mellow (round 1KHz). I tested the controller at much higher input speeds, so that shouldn't pose any problems.
Regards
Yuriy

P.S. I just checked prices for Newall DROs... Ouch!!!

[tomj]

I called Newall today and although the manual for that Icon converter is still on their website they said that it is unfortunately out of production because they introduced the DSG and DMG encoder heads a while back, which provide native TTL output. Bummer because those are $4-600...for the encoder head alone, no scale..ouch is right.
Tom