Reply To: Rotary encoders

[Anonymous]

As it says on the Renishaw website, their ICs are made by RLS, in Slovenia. RLS are an associate company of Renishaw, which I assume means that Renishaw have invested, in order to ensure continuity of supply chain.

From the datasheets on the Renishaw website their magnetic rotary encoders are claiming accuracies on the order of 0.1-0.2°, which is about what one would expect, looking at the datasheets for the RLS chips. Not surprisingly that's consistent with what you might expect from the AMS ICs. Of course the Renishaw optical encoders are orders of magnitude more accurate.

It would be rather difficult to write a distinct data pattern to a CDROM that actually coincided directly with the pattern of pits as CDROMs use a non-return-to-zero inverted encoding scheme, along with cross interleaved Reed-Solomn coding to minimise the effects of random and burst errors during the read process. In simple parlance the data to be written is encoded across a significant part of the CDROM, so that despite damage to a localised area the data can still be reconstructed.

Regards,

Andrew