Build your own DRO with an inexpensive Arduino board and a rotary encoder for many different tools.

I will show you step by step how I made a Digital Read Out that can be used on a variety of tools such as a lathe, milling machine , cut off saw etc.

[Foga]

Great idea! You really thinking outside of box! Cheap rotary as linear scale... I woud never tought of it. Thanx for sharing!

[kevracer]

Thanks for posting this series of videos, they were a great help.

[TAWPTool]

Interesting project. I already have a DRO on my lathe, but I'm going to adapt this to another project. Thanks for sharing!

[mattneff]

Thank you for sharing!! I'm thinking of making one for my table saw.

[winandd]

Nice! 👍
Note that this approach relies heavily on belt tension and calibration which could make it a bit tedious to get it reading very accurate I think

[zerk]

I'm trying to make a dro for my tailstock, so I can drill to depth accurately. I love this idea, and hope I can adapt it to my purpose. I've never used Arduino or a rotary encoder before, so not sure how far I will get.

[nicolasjonasson]

It would be nice if you could show how it looks like in action. That way I can understand what the different parts of your "device" does, and get a better understanding of the concept. Cool though!

[watahyahknow]

not building my own dro but i have a chineese one on my milling machine that has 4 inputs i like to use the forth for the quill, fitting a glass scale to that is a bit finniky and its packaging is kindof big compared to a rotary encoder
i know its possible to make a rotary encoder work on such a dro as i seen it done by someone in some metalworkers forum somewhere but havent found where i seen the exact info about the conversion yet

wat i would like to do is fit the rotary enconder straight to the shaft to wish the handle is mounted that moves the quill up and down (im thinking on placing the encoder on the other end over the cup holding the quill return spring )
mecanicly it isnt all that hard to do but i like to find out wat rotary encoder i would need to get the same .5 mm steps as a glass scale and translate the signal from the encoder to sumting the chineese dro reads as a glass scale in mm

logical thinking tells me youll probably need to know the distance traveled by the quill per full rotation of the handle to find out how many steps per rotation encoder i would need
keeping my thinking cap on i could probably just solder a plug for the dro straight to the encoders wires if i dont need to sum anything (like when i cannot find an encoder with the amount of steps i need for a one to one ratio ) to get the correct reading

[fabientuizat]

tres bel exemple de DRO merci de partager

[kevracer]

Hi just made a DRO based on your design. I have put a link in the video I've uploaded and also acknowledged that my design is based on your design. I couldn't get your Arduino sketch to work and had to re-write it. I'll share the new sketch in the near future.

[manusholm]

good day. brilliant build. i have a problem compiling the sketch. my IDE does not like the 'positive' . this is the error i
DRO_rotary_encoder_x:9:53: error: 'POSITIVE' was not declared in this scope

LiquidCrystal_I2C lcd(0x27, 2, 1, 0, 4, 5, 6, 7, 3, POSITIVE);
any suggestions to what Im doing wrong?

[andreynovysh]

I believe precision is useless for the lathe rubber belt etc...

[fabientuizat]

arduino est un bon micro mais pour utilisé des encoder le stm32 est bien mieux préparer

[abubakarsiddique]

can you give the code of this tutorial pls... ? it will be