Nubotics wheel encoders WW12 or WW11 in serial mode

[eschulma]

I have two new Nubotics wheel encoders, WW-12, that I wish to hook up to my Arduino Duemilanove. So far, it is not going very well. I am running them in serial mode, which looked fairly simple, but no joy. They have no sample code.

I looked at the Wheel Commander examples, which is a much more established product, and their serial code is extremely complicated and requires the use of 0 and 1 pins for serial, removing the best debugging tool that Arduino provides.

My question is, does anyone here have any experience with using the WW-12 (or WW-11) encoders in serial mode? Is it a straightforward matter of writing and reading strings to any software serial port, or do I need to go a more complicated route.

[Webbot]

I've got an older wheel watcher so no serial interface is provided - but I use it with WebbotLib via the quadrature encoder support.

I'm guessing your problem with the serial side is that you will have to parse the incoming strings - but tht's easy enough. My only issue with serial mode is that its inherently slow to xmit - so the encoder data you are getting is already out of date by the time you receive it. Yes - you should be able to use any serial port.

[eschulma]

The incoming strings should be easy to parse. You get D000016 or V0034, that sort of thing. The problem is that I am not even seeing any strings. Just gibberish.

I was concerned about the timeliness as well. I will go with quadrature mode as that is by far the standard method, and there is already code out for the Arduino. Thanks for the help.

[dhbromley]

Let me know if you've discovered anything on this subject.  I'm trying to use a WW12 with my Arduino Uno and can't find any example code.