Connecting iGaging Scales to TouchDRO Controller

If you read some of the earlier posts on this blog you will quickly see that the times were much simpler four years ago when it comes to iGaging scales: there was only one kind and red wire was "Vcc", black wire was "Ground", and so on. Since then iGaging has gone through several revisions of the original DIgiMag scales and has introduced AbsoluteDRO and EZ View scales. My goal for this post is to explain what are the different iGaging (and generic scales made by Shahe) that TouchDRO supports and how to connect them to the BlueTooth DRO controller.

Choosing the Right TouchDRO Adapter for Your Scales

One of the main design goals for the TouchDRO project was to create a flexible modular do-it-yourself digital readout for hobbyists and makers alike. Since raw scale position decoding happens in the adapter, one of the first decisions when setting up a TouchDRO system is the selection of the adapter. At the time of this writing there are two versions of pre-made adapter board and four different do-it-yourself options. All those choices can be confusing if you're new to the TouchDRO ecosystem, so let's look at the benefits and tradeoffs of each of the six options.

TouchDRO 2.5 Release Notes

I'm really excited to finally say that after many months of "Beta" testing, version 2.5 of TouchDRO has been released to "Production". Even though it didn't earn a full digit reales number of 3.0, this version encompasses a lot of major changes under the hood. Many of the changes were made in response to your feedback and requests, while others lay groundwork for future functionality, so let's take a look at the most noteworthy changes in the new version.

How to Build the Mixed Scale Digital Readout Kit

Last Monday I shipped the first batch of orders for the Mixed Scale DIY DRO Kit, so those of you that have placed an order have likely already received it. I know that many of the people who ordered the kits have electronics experience and won't need a step-by-step assembly instructions. With that said, I designed the kit to be very beginner-friendly, so in this post I will go over the assembly process in some detail, so someone with limited electronics experience should be able to follow it and end up with a working DRO controller.

Do-it-yourself DRO Mixed Scale Controller Kit

Mixed Scale Controller DIY DRO Kit is designed to simplify the build process of the "Mixed Scale" DRO controller. As the name suggests, this version of the controller comes as a do-it-yourself kit that consists of a bare printed circuit board, MSP430 microcontroller pre-programmed with the "Mixed Scale" firmware, BlueTooth transceiver, and all of the necessary parts to build the voltage shifter circuit. The board is primarily designed to run the Mixed Scale firmware and interface with 1.5V and/or 3.3V scales and calipers, but can be easily tweaked to work with quadrature encoders instead.

TouchDRO Adapter for Glass and Magnetic DRO Scales

TouchDRO adapter for Glass and Magnetic DRO Scales is used to interface glass and magnetic scales that use standard quadrature encoders to the TouchDRO Android application. It supports up to four scale inputs, directional tachometer, and touch probe input. All inputs are buffered and 5V-tolerant. Scale inputs can be either single-ended, or differential (for better noise immunity).

TouchDRO BlueTooth Adapter Board for iGaging Scales

Those of you that follow the TouchDRO Users G+ community know that I've been working on a pre-made adapter board for iGaging scales. Today I finished testing the first batch of the boards and will ship them out to the people that ordered them. The intention of this post is to clarify what the board does and doesn't do, as well as provide some basic instructions how to set it up.

Tablet for TouchDRO for $49.99

I test TouchDRO on a number of devices ranging from 10" Galaxy Note Tab to an old LG phone with 4" screen. One of the reasons being that there are subtle differences between devices, event if the OS version and build are the same and some devices work much better than others. For years I've been recommending Google Nexus 7 or Galaxy Tab 7. I use both devices for development and in the garage and stand behind my recommendation. Unfortunately those tablets aren't cheap. Up until now the alternative was to get a no-name Chinese tablet. While these tablets cost half as much, quality of software and hardware varies wildly. For some time I've been looking for an inexpensive tablet that is readily available and offer consistent and reliable performance and finally I found one that fits the bill: Amazon Fire 7" tablet for $49.99.

New Beta Version of TouchDRO Now Available

For almost a year since the last major release of TouchDRO (v2.0) I've been working on the new features and enhancements that will be released in v2.5. Some of the changes are pretty deep under the hood and will not be immediately obvious, but there is a number of features that will make the application more flexible and more convenient to use. This includes a complete revamp of the low-level readout processing with better metric mode support, new functions, improved graphical mode and several quality-of-life enhancements.