Automating an Wooden Automata, a sequence of one time steps?

Projects General Guidance
1

I'm an artisan (retired mech engineer)playing around with an Arduino Uno the past few weeks, for the first time, to automate a wooden Automata project I'm building. Getting frustrated! I get the basics, but having trouble to assemble tasks together easily. The project is a few simple steps;
1 start a motor (Motor1)
2 move a servo to a position and hold
3 start another motor to move a platform up (usingL298) and then hold
4 servo sweep several servos back and forth and then stop
5 start motor above in reverse to lower platform (again through L298)
6 move the servo in item 2 back to original position
7 stop (Motor1)

I would like the whole thing to start from a external pushbutton, and have thought that using an external latch relay to restart/stop the Arduino at each press might be necessary.

Anyway, look for for suggestions for a simple solution. There is so much info out there!

Thanks, Conk1

2

The demo Several Things at a Time illustrates the use of millis() to manage timing.

And I suggest looking at Planning and Implementing a Program because it will be much easier to implement your project if you treat it as a series of separate pieces.

I reckon you should manage your program as a series of transitions from one state to another. For example

  • preStart
  • motorStarted
  • servoMoving
  • servoFinished
  • platformMoving
  • etc

...R

3

Thanks for the reply. I've been attempting to follow "Several Things at One Time" because it seemed to make good sense, however I seem to get screwed up with initiating the update loops. I'll keep at this plan though. Thanks.

4

You sent me a PM for advice (please don't) and I don't know what you were trying that did not work. AFAIK all of my posted programs work on an Uno.

...R