unknowntothem:
Your project is very interesting, I am also very interested in a similar project, I have just ordered some stepper motors and would like to make a very simple arm at first hopefully progressing to something more versatile. Anyway just wanted to ask, have you made any headway with your idea on using steppers instead? The maths I am fine with but I am not a programmer and the little bit that I know, I have taken from generic code, so I am dreading the code writing.
Hi,
Yes, I have the arm working nicely - my problem at the moment is making the slider for it to move up and down (to indicate hours on my clock), this has proved to be much more difficult than I expected, but I think I have just about cracked it now
As I am using cheap stepper motors and they are just directly attached to the robot arms, there is some play in it so accuracy is not it's strong point, but it is very easy to make and gives you a lot of experience of the basics of robotic arms
MY latest stepper motor version of the sketch can be seen here - AlanEsq.com is for sale | HugeDomains
this version just waits for you to enter some coordinates via the serial interface (e.g. 100,100) an it then moves the arm to that position
it calibrates by moving to some stops (when you enter R) so you would have to modify this but to your own design but for testing just tell it to go to 100,100 then manually move the arm to this position (by measuring from the stepper motor output shaft)
As I have learned doing this project, robotics is a lot more complicated than I first expected, there is a lot of room for improvement with this sketch, but it works and will be a good starting point
I found that using the stepper motor library seemed to make things more complicated so I opted for controlling the stepper motors directly (by copying the demo which the supplier of the motors gave), so the sketch may look a little complicated at first, but all it is doing is cycling though the 8 variations of outputs to turn the motors one step at a time (i.e. 1000, 1100, 0100, 0110, 0010, 0011, 0001, 1001)
BTW - I had the opposite problem to you, I have done a lot of programming before (although not professionally), but had no maths experience. So together we should be able to do something interesting with this