Hello,

Almost all of the small digital Verniers and DROs comming from China these days have a little data slot on them, where one can connect a
serial cable and in this way communicate between the measuring device and a Personal Computer. Now.... in the last five years I have
been looking for a seller of these cables, (especially the cables to the verniers)  but no one seem to have them for sale.....
Do you know where one can buy them........  ?

I have not seen such things for sale, however I have poked around at my little cheapie digital caliper, and found you can interface the data signal using a basic stamp, propeller chip, or arduino, and these can interface with a PC. It may not be a clean and polished solution though. One thing to note: as far as I know, if you intend to somehow use that data with mach3, you can only send serial data from within mach3, not receive. If this is not true, I'd love to be corrected.

Hi Zaaephod :

I once saw a German guy selling such a 5 line display able to show 5 axes
but the price tag was totally unacceptable to me at the time, ( more than $ 300 )
but one could interface all the no name verniers or most of them. No I don’t plan
to import the data into Mach3, but it would be great to have such a gizmo for the
various occasions where I do manual work on my mill. I have a couple of Arduino Nano
somewhere, did you se a layout on how to interface those Chinese no name verniers
on the Arduino website ?   

Not for the arduino specifically, I was working with a propeller, but if you're familiar with the arduino platform, the links below should point you in the right direction.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Reading-Digital-Callipers-with-an-Arduino-USB/
http://robocombo.blogspot.com/2010/12/using-tis-launchpad-to-interface.html

Also, parallax makes some really nice lcd screens that are super easy to interface using a propeller. There may be something like this for arduino as well.
http://www.parallax.com/Store/Accessories/Displays/tabid/159/List/0/ProductID/51/Default.aspx?SortField=ProductName%2cProductName

Hope this helps

Really great link.... Thanks