For several years the so-called "remote DRO" capacitive scales, manufactured by Wenzhou Sanhe Measuring Instrument Co.,Ltd. have been the mainstay of budget do-it-yourself DRO setups. These scales first appeared in the USA around 2011 under iGaging brand as "DigiMag Remote DRO" or "DigiMag" but then started showing up all over the internet under various brand names, including AccuRemote, Shars and unbranded generic version. A few years ago iGaging has redesigned the display of the scales and rebranded them as EZ-View DRO. Around the same time Shanhe introduced two new models of the Remote DRO scales that look rather similar to the original model but have several key differences.
A few months ago I ordered a couple different lengths of each scale in order to test and reverse engineer the communication protocol, and finally was able to get to it over the holiday break. In short, these scales would work very well for a budget DRO build, but require different firmware to decode the position. As I'm working on adding the support to the firmware, let's take a closer look at the data format these scales use and other important characteristics.