6 ms·

$35 Husky digital caliper is metal with good battery life and lifetime warranty replacement at any Home Depot, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32804727 htt

$35 Husky digital caliper is metal with good battery life and lifetime warranty replacement at any Home Depot, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32804727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32804727 What would it take to retrofit a digital mechanism onto vintage vernier calipers? https://www.electroschematics.com/digital-caliper/ https://www.electroschematics.com/digital-caliper/ > There are several rectangular patterns etched onto a copper strip underneath the main scale (the part of the caliper along which the read head/slider moves). With the printed patterns on the bottom of the main circuit board, this forms a grid of capacitors. As the sliding jaw travels along the main scale, the capacitance of the printed patterns changes, the controller (chip-on-board) detects the resulting shifts in electrical charge, processes the signals and finally displays the readings on the LCD. Would be nice to have open firmware for digital calipers.

boltzmann-brain 4y ago
> What would it take to retrofit a digital mechanism onto vintage vernier calipers? Personally, analog calipers are more trustworthy to me, because you can never be in a state where you forgot to press the zeroing button - which happened to someone running a modern machine shop right in front of my eyes. If you care about the outcome of a process, eliminating every step that can fully destroy the result yields massive dividends. There's something to be learned here about every process, be it technology, customer retention, sales funnels, you name it. Having less steps is so extremely powerful that it can easily outweigh additional functionality of some sort.
- stacktrust 4y ago
  If AR takes off, analog+AR could offer the best of both worlds.
- elsjaako 4y ago
  I got given a fancy mitutoyo caliper once, it actually remembers the 0 setting. You don't need to set it every time like the cheap ones.
  - stacktrust 4y ago
    $50 iGaging clone of $130 Mitutoyo has absolute coords, https://www.amazon.com/iGaging-ABSOLUTE-Digital-Electronic-Caliper/dp/B00KDUD67G https://www.amazon.com/iGaging-ABSOLUTE-Digital-Electronic-C...

boltzmann-brain 4y ago

> What would it take to retrofit a digital mechanism onto vintage vernier calipers? Personally, analog calipers are more trustworthy to me, because you can never be in a state where you forgot to press the zeroing button - which happened to someone running a modern machine shop right in front of my eyes. If you care about the outcome of a process, eliminating every step that can fully destroy the result yields massive dividends. There's something to be learned here about every process, be it technology, customer retention, sales funnels, you name it. Having less steps is so extremely powerful that it can easily outweigh additional functionality of some sort.

stacktrust 4y ago
If AR takes off, analog+AR could offer the best of both worlds.
elsjaako 4y ago
I got given a fancy mitutoyo caliper once, it actually remembers the 0 setting. You don't need to set it every time like the cheap ones.
- stacktrust 4y ago
  $50 iGaging clone of $130 Mitutoyo has absolute coords, https://www.amazon.com/iGaging-ABSOLUTE-Digital-Electronic-Caliper/dp/B00KDUD67G https://www.amazon.com/iGaging-ABSOLUTE-Digital-Electronic-C...