Fast motor control over ethernet?

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Software Interfacing
1

Howdy all,

I have some stepper motors that I'm controlling with a Wii nunchuck plugged into the analog ports of the arduino duemilanove. It's really cool and has an instant response time. Now I want to see if I can control the motors with over a network connection with a fast response time.

The idea is that I could sit in another room and control the motors over my LAN from a computer joystick (hooked up to my laptop). I have an ethernet shield for the arduino.

I'm thinking that I could use the arduino as a server and just send a url request to it with the desired instructions (e.g. http://192.168.1.29/?m1=5&m2=-10). Is that technique going to allow for a fast response time? I want to be able to send many instructions per second, so how fast can the arduino process incoming url requests?

Are there other techniques for communicating quickly over ethernet?

2

You will probably want to create a UDP string stream over the Ethernet for the fastest responses.

Checkout "UDPSendReceiveString" in the Tutorial.

3

Thanks! I'll try to use UDP.

4

I'd like to try the UDP for "real time" joystick control some time.

5