On 8/30/22 6:16 AM, John Simmons wrote:
OK gang, who want to make money on a side business?
Design and build a hall effect replacement for the HyGain rotor
position pot. This part is the weak link in the rotor and new factory
parts sell for $65. I'm thinking lots of people would pay $100 for a
better part.
$100 retail price means the raw material cost should be ~$10-15.
That's pretty challenging.
Hall effect isn't great at sensing 360 degrees, it's more like a reed
relay sensing passage of a gear tooth or magnet. That would be (as
described elsewhere) a basically different scheme because they're more
"incremental encoders" and then you need a way to index it to zero.
Oddly, a cheap way might be to put a digital compass on the antenna, and
then having a microcontroller turn that into voltage (or resistance) for
the controller.
Adafruit has a three axis magnetometer for $5.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/5579 - it has a I2C interface. Then how
to get that data back to the shack. These days, I'd be thinking about
WiFi with a Pi-Zero or a Arduino, but some sort of serial interface
could also work.
Then, another microcontroller to turn it into a voltage.
You'd have to work out how to deal with "turn past 0 or 360" - with
geared pots, the "0-360" range is the middle of the pot range, so you
can get -10 degrees or 370 degrees.
Would a simple bang/bang rotator controller deal with that correctly? I
don't know.
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