Digital Readout DITRON D80

[DAN Z]

I just bought and mounted this DRO on my Bridgeport . All is almost fine... My X coordinate is reversed. The right hand side is reading -X and the left hand side is reading +X. Does anyone know how to flip the reference in the settings?
thanks any help will be appreciated. I have considered in flipping over the scale and reader, but I figure there must be a setting in the black box.
Dan

 

[Chips Everywhere]

How are those DROs? I thought about mounting one on my Bridgeport, I don’t need super precision or the best DRO for my application. I’m just drilling holes.

 

[eKretz]

I just bought and mounted this DRO on my Bridgeport . All is almost fine... My X coordinate is reversed. The right hand side is reading -X and the left hand side is reading +X. Does anyone know how to flip the reference in the settings?
thanks any help will be appreciated. I have considered in flipping over the scale and reader, but I figure there must be a setting in the black box.
Dan

 

[aribert]

How are those DROs? I thought about mounting one on my Bridgeport, I don’t need super precision or the best DRO for my application. I’m just drilling holes.

Long winded response.
I have (2) Ditron D80s on both my mill and lathe. I chose the D80 because it allows axis summing - so I could (have not bothered to learn the feature yet) have the resultant motion of the quill and the knee as one output and I wanted the LCD display - wonderful for bolt circles and the like. I bought my systems from Reeson (if you buy 80+ units Ditron is willing to badge it to your name).

I did the mill first and splurged on the 1 micron scales, I think that added about $15 to the total - mistake. My experience with a sample of 4 scales (all 1um) is that setting the magnetic gap between the read head and scale is very finicky - to the point that I set the read heads to drag on the scales. I had a dead spot in the quill scale. I diagnosed the probem and contacted Reeson. They told me it was most likely the read head and promptly sent me a replacement read head. I pointed out the new read head had the same issue and then they promptly sent me the replacement scale I had requested. Two years later, I just bought (2) replacement 5um read heads / magnetic tape for the X & Y axis of the mill.

For the lathe I bought the 5um scales. These scales allow the read head to have a magnetic gap up to about 1mm. I have set my gap between .25 to .5mm. I am not aware of any read errors on the lathe. I have scales on all three axis. The D80 allows compound vectoring (input the exact angle of the compound and the display with give the resultant X & Y position of the tool). My lathe is large enough that using the small form factor magnetic read heads, I was able to package the scale/read head inside both the cross and compound slides.