JasonPAtkins
Hot Rolled
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2010
- Location
- Guinea-Bissau, West Africa
Hi all,
I have an Acu-Rite VRO300M dro that I'm just installing on my mill. I'm replacing an old VFD-display Mitutoyo 2 axis unit whose Y scale died a year ago with this and a four scale setup to include both the knee and quill. The Cincinnati Toolmaster MT mill is imperial, and a lot of my projects are metric, so having direct reading metric position over all of the mill's moving parts will be an awesome upgrade.
Anyway, I bought the DRO and scales knowing that the display was a little dim. When I finally received it over here in West Africa, I'm having a hard time reading it. I opened up the unit and checked the pot that operates the "contrast" (although it actually appears to just be brightness, not contrast). Adjusting the pot does make it brighter and darker, but the brightest it will go is still very dim. It's a 100k pot, and unplugging it and measuring its resistance as I adjust it, it does look like it's working correctly (that would've been too simple). I don't see any burn-in or ghosting, so I don't know what else can go wrong with a CRT that would make it really dim.
Here are pictures of the CRT tube.
So, if anyone can give me any advice about fixing what I already have, that would be great. Failing that, I see three options:
1) Live with it. I can read the big numbers for the position of each axis - but if I need to read anything smaller like menus, I have to walk around the mill and get right up next to it.
2) Replace the CRT with an LCD. Kevin (bsgmachine) told me when he sold it to me that he'd seen some retrofit kits to swap the 8" or whatever CRT out for an LCD. That would work but mean more time waiting for something to be sent over here, and probably cost a couple of hundred bucks.
3) Some models of this DRO came with a VGA out option, so you could plug a normal computer monitor into them. This seems like an awesome choice - a cheap little 15" LCD monitor would be a huge and extremely readable DRO display! Unfortunately, mine doesn't have that option. However, as I was poking around inside the unit today, checking the pot, I noticed that there's a header on the motherboard labeled "video out". So, it appears that all I'd need in order to make that work is just a vga connector soldered to a ribbon cable with the correct pinout for that header. The pinout isn't listed in the manual though.
I suppose option 4 is to pony up the money for a new DRO, but honestly, this one does more than I need already (remember what I'm upgrading from) as long as I can read it. And 4 axis dro's aren't cheap, either!
So, I don't suppose anyone has one of these laying around that *does* have the video out option who'd be willing to either give me the vga pinout or sell me the vga connector?
Thanks in advance!
-Jason
I have an Acu-Rite VRO300M dro that I'm just installing on my mill. I'm replacing an old VFD-display Mitutoyo 2 axis unit whose Y scale died a year ago with this and a four scale setup to include both the knee and quill. The Cincinnati Toolmaster MT mill is imperial, and a lot of my projects are metric, so having direct reading metric position over all of the mill's moving parts will be an awesome upgrade.
Anyway, I bought the DRO and scales knowing that the display was a little dim. When I finally received it over here in West Africa, I'm having a hard time reading it. I opened up the unit and checked the pot that operates the "contrast" (although it actually appears to just be brightness, not contrast). Adjusting the pot does make it brighter and darker, but the brightest it will go is still very dim. It's a 100k pot, and unplugging it and measuring its resistance as I adjust it, it does look like it's working correctly (that would've been too simple). I don't see any burn-in or ghosting, so I don't know what else can go wrong with a CRT that would make it really dim.
Here are pictures of the CRT tube.
So, if anyone can give me any advice about fixing what I already have, that would be great. Failing that, I see three options:
1) Live with it. I can read the big numbers for the position of each axis - but if I need to read anything smaller like menus, I have to walk around the mill and get right up next to it.
2) Replace the CRT with an LCD. Kevin (bsgmachine) told me when he sold it to me that he'd seen some retrofit kits to swap the 8" or whatever CRT out for an LCD. That would work but mean more time waiting for something to be sent over here, and probably cost a couple of hundred bucks.
3) Some models of this DRO came with a VGA out option, so you could plug a normal computer monitor into them. This seems like an awesome choice - a cheap little 15" LCD monitor would be a huge and extremely readable DRO display! Unfortunately, mine doesn't have that option. However, as I was poking around inside the unit today, checking the pot, I noticed that there's a header on the motherboard labeled "video out". So, it appears that all I'd need in order to make that work is just a vga connector soldered to a ribbon cable with the correct pinout for that header. The pinout isn't listed in the manual though.
I suppose option 4 is to pony up the money for a new DRO, but honestly, this one does more than I need already (remember what I'm upgrading from) as long as I can read it. And 4 axis dro's aren't cheap, either!
So, I don't suppose anyone has one of these laying around that *does* have the video out option who'd be willing to either give me the vga pinout or sell me the vga connector?
Thanks in advance!
-Jason
