Hacking a digital tape measure?

It's easy to get line wrap issues with URLs. Use brackets. Issue goes away

--
Al, the usual

Usual Suspect wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news.sf.sbcglobal.net:

Thanks!

-- An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Two apples a day gets the doctor's OK. Five a day makes you a fruit grower like me.

Karl Townsend

I have not tried that, but an easier way might be to use a thing made to work that way. Several manufacturers make linear measuring units that work sort of like one of those spring loaded gadgets that you hang your keys on your belt with. It has a cable that pulls out and retracts with a spring. The internal spool rotates as the cable is pulled out, and that gives a quadrature output designed to easily relate to the distance the end of the cable has moved.

I used a couple on a job at work a few years back, it worked great. Not quite linear scale resolution/accuracy, but pretty darn good +/- a few thousandths IIRC with maybe 4 foot range. That was plenty for our application, and it was not nearly as costly as an equivalent linear scale and much more compact.

Unless you have some compelling reason to use a hacked digi-tape, this may be a good way to go. The name of the company that makes these is escaping me at the moment, but some Google work ought to turn it up.

Hope that helps.

AL A.

Check out the last link. I hope the tape measure is more accurate than the advertisement. It states, Accuracy: +/- 0.6"

Agent won't wrap lines that have a leading space. This line doesn't look wrapped to me. How does it look to everybody else?

Agent won't wrap an obvious url, either:

John

"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

both worked viewing in OE. I didn't know the brackets trick (also worked).

FWIW, Pan:

has a "view" menu item where one of the options is a "wrap article body" checkbox.

And the "compose" window has an option to wrap or not to wrap.

Admittedly, it's not too good at picking up various file associations with clickable links, but that's not that big of a deal - I do it so seldom (click links), that a three-click workaround is no hardship. :-)

Cheers! Rich

On Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:58:09 -0600, Ken Moffett scribed:

Why would you want to hack a tape measure??

If the digital tape measures are that cheap, just buy a couple and open them up to find the encoder. I am pretty sure it is just a photo electric light cell (opto tansmitter and receiver) and it reads the encoded strip on the tape. Kinda like a big, long barcode, just with a counter and positioning information.

If your really that interested do a google patent search on it.

I am sure you will come up with quite a few hits.

Phred wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

97241

That's exactly what I had in mind. I just wondered if anyone had tried it. One thing that I wondered about was: are the quadrature marks fractional and converted to cm on the display or visa versa. Anyway, I ordered a Sterrett Digitape Saturday...should be here Wednwesday. I'll let you know what I find.

Ken