DRO magnification.

[Reb53]

As a newbie I strongly suspect I'm in the wrong forum, asking the wrong question, of the wrong people !
However, having been on the other side of this equation I'm hoping someone will take pity...
My problem is this.
I know an old bloke who was an extremely competent precision engineer in the UK, with a very successful company making bits for lots of different companies, including Cosworth.
That is, until he found he was losing his sight.
Not completely blind, but severely vision impaired, he emigrated out to my part of the World, NZ, as the "brighter light" helps what little vision he has left.
He'd like to get back into his workshop where he has a DRO equipped mill, and lathe.
The numbers on the DRO are too small for him, and he'd like to have a way of enlarging them, maybe with a HD camera, and a large HD tv.
I know it sounds ridiculous, an almost blind man messing about with a lathe, ( borderline lethal actually...), but seeing what else he does in his workshop I have no doubts he'll manage, albeit slowly, and very carefully.
I cobbled up an old home security camera with some extra lenses, a 40 inch HD tv, and we got close to something that could work.

I'd like to help him out so if anyone has any clever ideas, knows of systems, or has done it before, I'd love to hear.

Ralph.
New Zealand.

 

[3DDave]

I've seen reports on completely blind cabinet makers using table saws, so sure, why not?

The longer way around would be to have a button to push to get the readout as a voice. I suspect a camera on a Raspberry Pi with computer vision could read the display directly. There should be a text to speech module as well. Of course if the DRO has a serial output, that would be a shorter path.

This page covers the reading part, including the Optical Character Recognition needed:

https://www.oreilly.com/content/raspberry-pi-cookbook-computer-vision/

This describes the text to speech part:

https://elinux.org/RPi_Text_to_Speech_(Speech_Synthesis)

Putting them all together is not something I can help with but there are Raspberry Pi forums that very likely can help.

Example of dealing with part of the process:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions...on-on-seven-segment-display-via-tesseract-ocr

(other results see:

https://www.google.com/search?q=7+segment+display+OCR

)

I like the Google translate suggestion:

http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=tw-ob&q=$*&tl=en

I suppose for the more generalized blind public another option would be a series of wheels with Braille on them; use some stepper motors and only drive the ones going at a reasonable speed (maybe vibrate ones to indicate the lathe is going faster than the dial can reasonably indicate?) I don't know if that would work out - I have seen that fingerspell to text systems is generally derided as a seeing person's answer that does blind people no good.

 

[EdStainless]

Another option is very large and bright displays.
You can buy LED panels that are very bright (>8,000 NIT) and display anything that you want on them in any size that you want.
You may need to go the Arduino/R-Pi route to handle feeding it and scaling.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
P.E. Metallurgy, consulting work welcomed

 

[btrueblood]

They make DRO sensors today that connect wirelessly to a cell phone or other wifi/bluetooth capable device. So, a large tablet PC could be the display.

This is one such example:

https://littlemachineshop.com/products/product_view.php?ProductID=5513

 

[itsmoked]

ViewMarq MD4 series industrial LED message display, 1 line x 12 characters, 1.5in and 2in, supports (2) serial ports and (1) Ethernet port for configuration and external message control, NEMA 4/12, indoor use only.

Perhaps one of these industrial message displays.
If it can't take a serial stream out of the DRO and interpret it you could use a bare-bones CLICK! PLC cpu module to interpret between the two. For cost reduction you could use the single line message display above and have a single button that cycles thru the DRO axis to show just the one of interest.

Or spend more and get up to a 4 line display.
ViewMarq LED Message Displays

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[Reb53]

Thanks for all the suggestions, certainly given me some new avenues to explore.
The industrial message board sounds a good idea, but getting the Easson DRO to talk to it is well beyond my electronic know how.
I asked Easson themselves, and whilst the question was, apparently, put to one of their techs they weren't able to help.
I'm still thinking something very simple, like an HD camera pointing at the DRO, and then projecting onto a large HD display/tv.
The display needs to be close to the machinery so feed screws etc can be turned whilst watching the display.
So from the operators point of view it's just turn on a camera, turn on a tv, as he can't see enough to be inputting parameters etc into a PC.
This could be a mission, but as they say, "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions......"

Ralph.

 

[EdStainless]

The reason that we balk at using camera/TV is multifold.
Will the flicker rate of the DRO and camera shutter speed work together?
TVs are rather low brightness/low contrast displays and they are not designed to show sharp edges. so getting distinct and clear numbers on the screen could be an issue.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
P.E. Metallurgy, consulting work welcomed

 

[Reb53]

Thanks, that makes sense.
If some electronics expert wanted a side hustle they'd do worse than figuring out the interface between a common DRO, ( Easson?), and a big message board type readout.
I'm sure such a thing wouldn't be useful to only vision impaired machinists, ( ! ), but as displays in factories that have lots of automated machinery, and not many humans.
I'm slightly surprised that Easson had nothing, I guess if I wanted a thousand they'd figure it out.

Ralph.

 

[IRstuff]

The Easson DROs typically have no interfaces other than the transducer inputs.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list

http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm

 

[CWB1]

I would pose this question on practicalmachinist as someone there likely can tell you the entire history of DROs through today having lived it and designed the tooling for them. I don't recall details, but have seen several folks on forums hack dead DRO readers to port onto big screen televisions fairly easily. IIRC some use a standard video format albeit without a standard connector so a bit of soldering is all that is necessary.

 

[Reb53]

Thanks, that'll be the next move if the current plan doesn't happen.
Which is a talking DRO, no vision required.
Sounds interesting, if it comes about I'll let you all know.