Dexter

The encoder is my very favorite part of the robot. I've written a page about how it works in detail: https://github.com/HaddingtonDynamics/Dexter/wiki/Encoders In summary, it's a hybrid of digital and analog. To the standard quadrature encoder slit counter, we add sensing of the light levels as each slit covers or obscures the phototector. So we get e.g. 200 slits times 8096 light levels inside each slit equals over a million positions. It's so much data that we need an FPGA to process it fast enough. You can breath on the arm and it can sense it. There is a constant battle between writing for sales/investment and writing for technical disclosure. Sometimes we get some chocolate in the peanut butter. It's certainly not phony, and I'm happy to answer any questions that anyone has about the real technical abilities. The $2,999 price was for

> Where did they get a shaft encoder with over a million counts per rev? they use about 200 tick encoders, but instead of measuring on or off they measure light intensity. Because each encoder slot has a bit of variation they get absolute positioning.[0] This is what their FPGAs are for. As for the reason this robot is so expensive, the inconel harmonic drive gear boxes are probably a good portion of the cost. Harmonic drives aren't made in big production runs. The assembly instructions are somewhat horrifying and involve quite a bit of manual labor.[1] There's a lot of cutting carbon fiber rod and gluing it into the 3d printed bits. The horrifying bit is that you have to glue stuff to the motors and it appears that some assemblies aren't exactly made to come apart. [0]https://github.com/HaddingtonDynamics/Dexter/wiki/Encoders [1]http://