Karl Townsend wrote:
Just curious, I'm sure you use more encoders than me. I always order from
USdigital. So far, I've had no problems at all with their products. Their
kits are priced lower than anyone else I know of.

is Renco better?
Yes. There have been a number of problems with US
Digital encoders, especially
if you read the Gecko list. There is a thread on
this almost every month where somebody has built a
big machine and it is going crazy, and they
eventually have to either add capacitors next to
the encoder, install a line driver/receiver module
or replace with a different vendor.

Renco has a wider range of available sizes, shaft
size, resolution, output type including
differential line driver built into the encoder,
etc. Their prices are not bad at all on their
latest "modular" encoder, meaning the ones without
their own bearings.

Renco also has a couple lines of 6-channel
encoders that produce not only the normal ABZ
signals but also commutation signals for brushless
motors. These used to cost MANY hundreds of $,
but Renco now has some around $60, which is a great
deal to revive an expensive brushless motor.

It now appears that Renco is a division of
Heidenhain, and the Heidenhain US site
is down with the same mysterious "under
maintenance" message. Even funnier
is if you go to their old web store page
http://store.renco.com/ you now get an
Apache default web server page. I wonder if these
guys are running this on their
HOME computers? I can't believe a big,
multinational corporation would PLAN to just
go offline for days at a time!

Jon