Description
Seeed Studio Grove - 12-bit Magnetic Rotary Position Sensor / Encoder (AS5600)
Traditional Potentiometers
A potentiometer is a three-terminal resistor with a sliding or rotating contact that forms an adjustable voltage divider." Simply put, the potentiometer converts relative position information into electrical signals. But the traditional potentiometer needs to be in contact with the object being measured. What about scenes that need to be contactless, such as high-speed motor, or high-precision robot arm?
Contactless Potentiometer
The Grove - 12-bit Magnetic Rotary Position Sensor (AS5600) is a contactless potentiometer.
The Grove - AS5600 is a programmable 12-bit high-resolution contactless magnetic rotary position sensor. The Grove - AS5600 can work as a magnetic potentiometer and a magnetic encoder with excellent reliability and durability. Compared with the traditional potentiometer/encoder, the Grove - AS5600 has significant advantages: high precision, non-contact, no rotation angle limitation. All those advantages make it is perfectly suitable for non-contact angle measurement applications, such as the robot arm, tripod head, motor closed-loop control and machine tool axis positioning.
More information on the above demo can be found here
Difference between traditional and magnetic encoder
AS5600 is based on the Hall Effect, the build-in Hall sensor can detect changes in the direction of the magnetic field, thus, there is also no rotation angle limit. Then the magnetic field direction information is amplified by the amplifier, with the help of the build-in 12 bit A/D, the AS5600 module can output 4096 positions per round. The output is selectable, you can either use the I2C interface to output the RAW data or output the PWM wave/Analog wave via the OUT pin. The maximum angle is also programmable, you can set the maximum angle from 18° to 360°, which means that the measured angular accuracy is up to 18/4096.
AS5600 is excellent for the non-contact rotary position sensor, so we made this AS5600 Breakout Board in the Grove form factor. With the Grove I2C connector, you can easily connect this AS5600 module to Arduino. Also, we provide the full function AS5600 Arduino library
Attention
The AS5600 has certain requirements for the magnetic field to be measured. Please use a magnet similar in size to the chip. The module should be measured as close as possible to the magnetic field and the AS5600 sensor center should be aligned with the center of the magnetic field. The vertical distance is preferably from 0.5 mm to 3 mm.
