At the moment I am mentoring a high school robotics building team and I came across a problem that I need a little help with. For a potential sensor we are considering using a digital semicircular sensor capable of measuring angular position.

The sensor must have be able to measure the angular position to a precision of 0.3 degrees.

My questions are:

What is the number of concentric rings and on-off sensors are needed to achieve this precision?

Is their a simple formula that I'm missing here, it appears like this could be easily solved with some knowledge of this type of sensor.

I apologize that I cannot give too much detail on the subject, It just so happens that I am actually a chemistry teacher and don't have much experience behind the formulas that govern digital rotation sensors.

Regards,
Mr. Evans

 

Hello,

It depends on the type you look for.
With an absolute you need th number of rings dependend on the resolution.
Witn an incremental sensor you are counting the number of marks after the indexmark.
You say that you want to detect changes of 0.3 degrees.
A full circle has 360 degrees. so the number of positions you need is 360 / 0.3 = 1200 positions.

Binairy coding looks like this.
1,2,4,8,16,32 ... 1024 for 2^0 , 2^1 , 2^3 , 2^4 , 2^5 ... 2 ^ 10 so you need 11 rings to encode 1200.

See also this link from the EDUCYPEDIA.
http://mechatronics.mech.northwestern.edu/design_ref/sensors/encoders.html

This link comes from this page in encoders and resolvers from the EDUCYPEDIA.
http://www.educypedia.be/electronics/sensorsencoders.htm

Greetings,
Bertus

 

Hi,

What is the number of concentric rings and on-off sensors are needed to achieve this precision?

Is their a simple formula that I'm missing here, it appears like this could be easily solved with some knowledge of this type of sensor.

If you are referring to something like this

(a 1°/step for the steering in an autonomous robot), there is indeed a formula.

ceil(log(n)/log(2))

Where
n = number of segments
and ceil means "if not integer, round up to nearest (higher) integer"

log(1200)/log(2) = 10.229 (to 3 decimal places)
Rounding up gives you the number of rings and sensors needed = 11