Hello,

        Thanks for the PM.

        OK like i have already said I need more information. There are parts of your requirement missing. Pitch of thread and deg of rotation per step are not really of a great deal of relevance to the way you want to program the system in terms of the user interface with the LCD and the 4x4 keyboard. from the information you have supplied all I can work out is that there are 100 steps per mm but you already know that.

I need to know what hardware you have

• what motor do you have
• what stepper motor driver do you have
• what LCD module do you have and its interface I.E. UART/SPI/parralel
• what 4x4 keypad do you have
• what Arduino variant do you have

in addition i need to know your time scale expectations

Once I have all of this information then I can start to give you an idea of development costs.

Cheers Pete.

One option to overcome the shortage of PWM pins is to use the soft PWM library

http://code.google.com/p/rogue-code/wiki/SoftPWMLibraryDocumentation

I use this for LED driving where timing is not critical.

 

If teleworking is not a problem for you I have already built systems very much like yours for other clients. I have sent you a PM with my details and past projects. If I can help let me know.

Cheers Pete.

Some more information on the User Interface would be good a 4x4 keyboard it a bit open considering the you want the values to be absolute or relative, you need a way to select this using the interface.

Are yo expecting the "steps" of the motor to give you a position based on a fixed calibration point, can the movement be actuated manually, if so then the "step" counter will be out. An encoder wheel on the drive shaft is a better option or a stepper motor with a built in encoder wheel.

I have sent you a PM with some of my other work listed. If I can be of some help please drop me a PM or send to my personal email .

Cheers Pete.

I'll take your money  

Seriously though like Paul said. Why not learn how to do it.

I mean what use are you going to be to an employer designing stuff if all you ever do is buy the design from someone else. They could do that themselves and cut out the middle man.


For the Audio use one of these VS1000 Audio Module http://www.vlsi.fi/en/products/vs1000module.html only $20 and the cost of an uSD card and all programmable using serial commands through the serial port with a nice 5v power rail and TTL level UART

Cheers Pete.

Hi,

I don't actually live in London I live in France but I used to live in the UK before I moved here. I would be happy to help you with some design ideas. I have already worked with touch devices and audio interfaces as well as radio links and MIDI controllers etc.

I have sent you a PM with some of my past projects on, take a look if you think I can help then give me a shout.

Cheers Pete.

HI Dom,


I think the first option is your best as it is a self contained [player with almost everything you need out of the box.

I can build you something using this module. Would you be wanting to control it in some way or just have it play a song list from the start every time the headphone jack was plugged in.


As far as Photovoltaic cells are concerned they are also readily available off the shelf and are easily connected to this board with some attentional bit and bobs to make it all work.


I have sent you a PM with my email address so we can take this off forum if you want to.

Cheers Pete

HI,

Do these players have to be doing anything else when not being listened to ?

If not then the plugging in of a headphone could in itself be the switch that controls the power to the unit making it not use up any battery when not being played.

What is it playing, some music coded onto a removable media ?

Do they have to be waterproof and if so to what level ?

Cheers Pete.

Can you explain that a little more? Im very new to this.

Here are a couple of pictures of the Fritzing layout that replicates breadboard and the PCB that finally went into production.

As you can see the DIL chips fit a standard breadborad. I use standard headers to connect the Servos to

Cheers Pete

the chip can emulate a keyboard mouse > have a look at the leonardo examples for controlling mouse/kyb

Ahhh OK i see now, you are pretending to be a keyboard/mouse

So how would you get the drivers for your "HID" loaded onto the PC so that is can interact with the device you have just plugged into the USB port. Perhaps you are suggesting that it should also look like a mas storage device to the PC and run some kind of auto-run software when plugged in. If that is the case why not just do it all in software.

Cheers Pete.

That looks good. Ill check around for those servos. how about bread-boarding? any idea how that would work?

This is a DIL chip and so will fit into your standard breadboard without any problems, I built my prototype on breadboard

I also used an atmega328 chip nativly and not an Ardiuno board as it keeps the cost of production down.

My design also used an SPI capacitive touch sensor breakout from sparkfun and so they both sat on the SPI bus together.


Cheers Pete.

If you use servos instead of motors, you don't need any special driver hardware (they are just controlled from a PWM analog output pin).

Depending how many servos you need to control, it may be difficult to drive them all from a single Arduino (difficult but not impossible - but adding multiple Arduinos might be an easier problem to solve than multiplexing servo outputs).

Or you could use one of these http://proto-pic.co.uk/20-channel-rc-servo-driver/

I am using one for client where the Arduino is tied up doing other stuff that messes with the timers and so the PWM. This solution passes PWM signal generation away from the Arduino and is very stable.

Cheers Pete.

OK so can you answer a few questions first

• What Arduino platform are you using
• What motion sensor are you using
• What baud do you want the serial monitor to send data at

This is only a few lines of code once we have the required information.

Cheers Pete.

[really]

or if its the batteries which cannot provide enough amperage for the servos under heavy loads (the battery pack is 4 AS's).

Ooh, ooh, I know. It isn't the software.

Oddly enough it could well be the software  If the timing loop that is setting the time between the PWM is too long the servos stop trying to seek, they go into no resistance mode. If the servos are under a small load that causes them to move off the desired point slightly when this happens then they will indeed jitter or oscillate about the desired point.

But then a really big battery might fix it too 

Cheers Pete.