Quadrature encoder wheels hard to find

I would like to buy quadrature encoder wheels, but it seems they are hard to find - unless I want something the size of a 1990 balled mouse. I found small ones, with 2mm bore/shaft size - and others with low resolution. I would like some with maybe a 1/2 bore size, like 1" - 2" wheel, if possible. I would love to be be in the position to afford the $600.00 price, that these vendors are asking for a thin piece of sheet metal with a bunch of fine punches around the outside, wowee how my life would be easy.

All the laser printers and inket printers I have tried (and I have tried many) - can not print a solid high resolution image on a transparency without at least one blemish that renders the image unusable. I feel like I have to hire an old-school photographer with their own equipment to develop my encoder wheel, but that seems too involved for my prototype testing.

I was wondering if anyone here seen encoder wheels around the internet anywhere, since my eBay searching efforts have seemed to exhaust themselves.

The quadrature encoder and the wheel are two different things.

I am looking for only the wheel disc. I have the optical electrical pickup sensors.

If it's not an quadrature encoder wheel, what is it called?

Find someone with a laser cutter?

US Digital makes some nice ones. I don't remember them as being expensive.

Hi.

I happened to be searching for 'encoder' over at Aliexpress in another tab, when i saw this thread.
I remembered i saw something 1 or 2 pages back.
Does this qualify ?
With a diameter of 40 mm it is within your 1 - 2 inches.

Sometimes you need to leave out some of the search terms like 'quadrature' to find what you are looking for (but you will need to sift through all the results).

MAS3:
Hi.

I happened to be searching for 'encoder' over at Aliexpress in another tab, when i saw this thread.
I remembered i saw something 1 or 2 pages back.
Does this qualify ?
With a diameter of 40 mm it is within your 1 - 2 inches.

Sometimes you need to leave out some of the search terms like 'quadrature' to find what you are looking for (but you will need to sift through all the results).

Yes that is what I was looking for. It is 100 lines, so is a low resolution. At $13.00 w/ free shipping is kind of reasonable for what it is I guess. They actually sell whole sealed encoders for $12.00. I wanted at least 360 lines, but it could get the job done.

I would probably need to find someone with laser cutter, or a photography screen printing business that has good sharp dark laser printers.

I found this one by "reccomended" page on aliexpress

Expensive example

At $30 it is too expensive. But this is exactly the ideal grade and size that I would like. They have the HEDS high quality quadrature decode sensor in the picture too. Unfortunately the sensors are like $5.00, and the wheels are $30! Obviously not something that flys off the shelves as a popular sale item.

Heard of aliexpress.com ?

I made some tiny encoder wheels once by carefully drawing them large on posterboard, taking a lot of photos on 35mm film, and using the negatives.

One rotated, the other didn't move. One wheel had one more white and black stripe than the other. So you'd get a light patch that appears to rotate backwards at high speed. Then I could use photointerrupters that were much larger than the transparent areas.

This was all long before Alibaba... pre-Web. I built it with flint and sinews.

Or like this one, where the slits for Phase A and Phase B are offset from each other by one half the width of a space.

polymorph:
I made some tiny encoder wheels once by carefully drawing them large on posterboard, taking a lot of photos on 35mm film, and using the negatives.

One rotated, the other didn't move. One wheel had one more white and black stripe than the other. So you'd get a light patch that appears to rotate backwards at high speed. Then I could use photointerrupters that were much larger than the transparent areas.

This was all long before Alibaba... pre-Web. I built it with flint and sinews.

25+ years ago, I was trained on the practice of using the rub-off pads & lines to render a circuit board. We had the photography class too developing and processing photography. If I wanted lettering, I had my choice of 3 font styles on each 12" floppy disk. OR manually cut them out by hand and place them on acetate.

I would just print out an encoder wheel from laser printer - except the 4 of them I owned each had a different expensive problem that could not render me a clean image on a transparency. I do not know anyone lives near me that owns a laser printer for me to use, either. Last week I did discover with my INKJET, if I print on a transparency, then bake it in the toaster oven 10 minutes at 250(f), the ink will bind & dry. I can probably develop a PCB with the inkjet print after a whole bunch of fun playing with the exposure sensitive, due to the terrible inkjet contrast.

If your inkjet printer uses pigmented ink and you can fit a PCB in it, you can print right on the board, bake it, and etch it.

We tried a lot of different cheap and less cheap things in inkjet printers over on Homebrew_PCBs on Yahoogroups, then a gentleman named Volkin Sahin found that baking pigmented ink at a fairly high temperature allowed it to act as a resist that did not wash away.

I started a group just for this process, but there isn't much traffic there.

One of our members, James Newton, collected a lot of the relevant information and put it on his website here:

http://techref.massmind.org/techref/pcb/etch/directinkjetresist.htm

I have an Epson printer that takes a CD tray, it also takes an ID card tray and I have an ID card cutter that will cut PCBs 0.030 inches or less in thickness.

If your inkjet printer uses dye ink, another member of Homebrew_PCBs came up with another method - print on the board, sprinkle toner on it which sticks to the ink, then run through a laminator to melt the toner on.

These new inkjet ideas are great - thank you very much. I never thought to seal the wet ink with toner what a great idea.

I spent a few hours reading and researching. These printers on the list are old, and can't be found new for reasonable prices. I can buy a new CD-printer. But the LINK says - the epson inkjet printers WILL NOT print on the center hole of the dvd tray, and I get something like the size of a cd except a hole in the center? This is crazy.

Broadcom 500 Pulse Code Wheel from RS

or

Broadcom 1000 Pulse Code Wheel

Farnell do a bunch as well - maybe too small tho'

But the term 'code wheel' might turn up some more hits.

Yours,
TonyWilk