UG108: Praxis II Asian Institute of Technology Handout: Optical Encoder

January 2013 Undergraduate Program Instructor: Chaiyaporn Silawatchananai, Matthew N. Dailey

Optical Encoder for Motor Control Tutorial

Introduction: Motion Controls are widely used in a variety of application. Among them, Position and velocity control are extensively implemented in applications such as robotics and drive control, in order to improve the performance. For example, robot arm can move its link to the desired position precisely. To achieve that, the information of position or velocity need to feedback to computer or processor. In this tutorial we will learn the principle of optical encoder for motor control, build your own encoder and using Arduino to count the pulse.

Optical Encoders
An optical encoder is a sensor that is used to monitor the direction of rotation, position or velocity of a rotary or linear operating mechanism. This device typically consists of four elements: a light source, a light sensor, an optical disc and signal conditioning circuitry. The light source is usually a light-emitted diode (LED) that transmits infrared light. The light sensor is a phototransistor that is more sensitive to infrared energy than to visible light. The optical disc is connected to the shaft being measured so that they rotate together. Usually, the disc is made of plastic, glass or metal. It has opaque and translucent regions. The disc is placed between the light source and sensor as shown in Figure 1. Optical encoders are classied as either incremental or absolute. This tutorial will focus on incremental encoder.

Figure 1: A structure of optical encoder As the disc is rotated, light passes through the translucent segment and is block by the opaque area. Thus, the encoder sends the pulse-train signals as Figure 2. If you always know which direction the disc is moving, then one sensor or one channel signal is enough. But if you are changing the direction frequently, you may want to measure the direction as well. By adding another optical sensor with carefully placed in relation to the rst, you can detect the direction of motion in addition to the speed. According to Figure 3, you see that the distance between the two sensors is half of one division. Whenever one sensor is on the boundary between light and dark, the other is in the middle of a solid light or dark area. If the wheel is moving counterclockwise, sensor 1 sees a light or dark area before it reaches sensor 2. If the wheel direction is reversed, then sensor 2 sees the light or dark rst. (In the waveforms, high represents light and low represents dark. Depending on your circuit it might be the opposite.) These sensor readings are 90 degrees out of phase. A simple program in a microcontroller can detect these transitions and turn it into a count that increases when the wheel goes one direction and decreases when the wheel goes the other

Figure 2: Optical Encoder with 1 sensor, reproduced from http://thedenneys.org/pub/robot/encoders/

Figure 3: Optical Encoder with 2 sensor, reproduced from http://thedenneys.org/pub/robot/encoders/ direction. With two sensors there are two bits of digital information, so you will need two input pins per optical encoder. The quality of an encoder is measured by the number of slot per round, called resolution. The higher the number of slot, the more precise the angular position can be measured, and then the better the encoder. For example, if the disk has 360 slots, then each slot represents 1 degree of rotation. By contrast, for the disk with 760 slots, each slot refers to 0.5 degree of rotation.

Building your own encoder

If you are looking for optical encoders in the market, you will probably nd that they are quite expensive. Alternatively you can take apart a computer mouse which consists of two tiny encoder wheels, one for X and Y motion. If you have these stus, you may not need to construct your own wheel. To make an encoder wheel, let us try encoder design program which can be download from http://www.societyofrobots.com/ downloads/Encoder_Design12.exe written by Scoot Boskovich. You can specify the size of disc, the number of slot or divisions, then save as .bmp le and print out. For todays lab we will make a encoder and attach o the wheel or the rotating shaft. The reective optical sensor, TCRT5000L which include an infrared emitter and phototransistor in a package, is used to detect the black area on the disc, and generate the pulse-trained signal when the disc is rotated. Figure 4a and Figure 4b shows a package of TCRT5000L and schematic for detection, respectively. The output from sensors can connect to Arduino directly in order to count the pulse and check the direction. We can interpret the number of counted pulse to the angular position in degree unit. For example, the encoder has 16 divisions and Arduino can count 20 pulses. It means that the disc is rotated for 20*360/16 = 450 deg.

(a) Reective optical sensor, reproduced from http://www.robotshop.com/ca/PDF/ vishay-TCRT5000L-infrared-reflector-specs. pdf

(b) Schematic for detection

Figure 4: Reective optical sensor, TCRT5000L

Component required
1. Arduino UNO R3 2. Breadboard 3. Resistor (330ohm) and (10kohm) 4. Reective Optical Sensor TCRT50001 5. DC Motor 6. Digital Oscilloscope 7. DC power supply

Arduino pin numbers

Pin 2 as Encoder A Pin 4 as Encoder B

Example : Read quadrature Encoder (checks the Encoder in loop())

/* Read Quadrature Encoder * Connect Encoder to Pins encoder0PinA, encoder0PinB, and +5V. * * Sketch by max wolf / www.meso.net * v. 0.1 - very basic functions - mw 20061220 * */ int int int int int int val; encoder0PinA = 2; encoder0PinB = 4; encoder0Pos = 0; encoder0PinALast = LOW; n = LOW;

void setup() { pinMode (encoder0PinA,INPUT); pinMode (encoder0PinB,INPUT); Serial.begin (9600); } void loop() { n = digitalRead(encoder0PinA); if ((encoder0PinALast == LOW) && (n == HIGH)) { if (digitalRead(encoder0PinB) == LOW) { encoder0Pos--; } else { encoder0Pos++; } Serial.print (encoder0Pos); Serial.print ("/"); } encoder0PinALast = n; }

Description

Figure 5: waveform of the A&B channel of an encoder, reproduced from http://playground.arduino.cc When the code nds a low-to-high transition on the A channel, it checks to see if the B channel is high or low and then increments/decrements the variable to account for the direction that the encoder must be turning in order to generate the waveform found. One disadvantage of the code above is that it is really only counting one fourth of the possible transitions. In the case of the illustration, either the red or the lime green transitions, depending on which way the encoder is moving.

References
http://thedenneys.org/pub/robot/encoders/. http://www.societyofrobots.com/sensors_encoder.shtml http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/RotaryEncoders http://www.robotshop.com/ca/PDF/vishay-TCRT5000L-infrared-reflector-specs.pdf Industrial Control Electronics: Devices, Systems & Application by - Terry Bartelt.