Tag Archives: photointerrupter

Make your own quadrature rotary encoder

quadrature_encoderIn this post we will add a second photointerrupter to our rotary encoder. This will give you information about the direction your rotary device turns. So you will be able to count forward and backword depending on the turning direction. This is necessary e. g. for many positioning application. The encoder we will make is also called a quadrature encoder. Continue reading

Make your own rotary encoder

In the first and second post of this series you saw the basics of how to use photointerrupters. Now it’s time for practice. We make a rotary encoder. Here we take a single photointerrupter that gives us the pulses we can count. In a later post we will take two of them to get information about the direction of rotation. But now let’s start with the simple version.
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photointerrupter schematic details

photointerrupter_wiring_generalIn my second post about photointerrupters I show you how to get things working properly and how to spend only as much energy as necessary. The schematic diagram shows the basic wiring for a photointerrupter like the TCST 2103 that I introduced already in my first post. Now it is time to find the best values for the two resistors. Continue reading