I have a pair of 29:1 37Dx52L motors with the 64 CPR Encoders which I’m going to run with an Arduino Mega ADK and an Adafruit motor shield. I’m pretty clueless about encoders, have looked for documentation, found some re: manual rotory encoders, the encoders that Pololu sells separate, but nothing specific to the 64 CPR’s. Can someone point me towards the docs or give me a quick primer on using these?
regards, Richard
The easiest way to use a quadrature rotary encoder is to treat one of the outputs as “direction” and the other as “step.”
Each time the “step” wire goes from low to high, read the “direction” wire. If it’s high, the motor is going one direction, else it’s going the other. Count the number of steps to know how far you’ve traveled.
This will give you 16 “steps” per revolution, rather than the 64 separate transitions, but it’s usually good enough, and very easy to get working.
There is nothing special about the 64 CPR encoders. They have A & B quadrature outputs which are connected to two inputs on your MPU. You’ve probably already seen the Arduino tutorials – they all apply and will work with this motor/encoder combination. For full speed counting, you will probably need the high performance interrupt library. See playground.arduino.cc/Main/RotaryEncoders
