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Passing 8bit info into PC

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wilbee

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Dear all,

For the project i am doing at university now. I need to use some optical encoders to detect linear motion. Therefore, i chose a ordinary incremental encoders from agilent technologies and a interface chip which will process the signals from the encoder and count the number of increments (up/down). the chip has a 8 bit counter (parallel).

and the problem for me now is to find some way to pass this 8bit information into my PC, so i can plot some real-time data, like dist, vel etc, using packages like LabView.
however, i am having trouble to process this. Although i can pass this 8bit into a DAC and get my PC to acquire the voltage output but I don't think this is a very good idea as i will loss resolution due to this extra processing.

thank you very much first. any help is appreciated.

the part number of the encoder and interface chip are:
HEDS-9720
HCTL-2000

Many thanks
wil :wink:
 
I think National Instruments or Measurement Computing sells 99$ Digital IO PCI cards. Both will have labview drivers. Measurement computing also has a USB based data aquisition device for about $100.

You could also buy a cheap microcontroller dev kit to make your own parallel to RS232 converter.


Brent
 
This sounds like another project for a PIC (or other micro-controller), you could probably interface the encoder directly to the PIC, and use that to feed to the serial port on the PC - possibly using a MAX232 to convert to RS232 levels, or simply feeding the PIC pin to the PC serial for a somewhat crude, but effective, serial connection.

This would give you a one or two chip solution, at the cost of programming the PIC.
 
8)
The parallel port of PC can be used in SPP mode or in Bidirectional mode for read 8 bits of data.

In SPP(standard) mode you can read only 4 bits(nibble) of data at a time, but with some external hardware and internal code you can read low and high nibbles in order.

In Bidirectional mode, the Data port(8 bits) can be programmed in input mode if bit 7 of Control port is set to 1. In this case you no need external hardware for read all 8 bits of data. But the paralel port must be set from BIOS setup in Bidirectional mode.

If you search on Internet about Paralle Port you will find a lot of info.
 
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