Quote Originally Posted by tonyfoale View Post
BTW cables to plug straight in to the data ports are not common, few sellers have them, and many people just solder directly on to the terminals.
Tony, I found the same issue:
I tried several years ago to get one for the Mititoyo vertical mill quill digital indicator, and had zero luck finding a cable that could interface to some affordable SPC reader. I had only tried eBay. I was hoping there would have been an ISA card for the PC (now a PCI or USB card would be wanted). I did find a web site that discouraged me, with the lack of any data standard for the many digital scales out there (as you stated). If you can't get it into a data stream and captured in the PC, makes it tough to go the cheep route, as I don't want to fit the mill with ballscrews, and felt this would provide a feedback means of a low cost CNC.

Yes I could get some micro controller, but then I'd be spending many hours horsing around with software code, and that's not really how I want to spend my time these days.

Even finding a quadrature decoder/counter off the shelf requires a micro controller to read and transfer the data.

I'm whittling metal with out the CNC help, and at this moment, I have no project held up for this.

Steve