Stepper control from RC Receiver

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
1

I am trying to control 2 BIPolar steppers from an RC Receiver. I can control them using the Motor Shield from LadyAda but I need to interface that to an RC Receiver and run them as servos would be on a camera gimbal. Can I use pulseIn to read the servo signal and then map that to a stepper number for direction and speed?

Is there a better way to do this by building another motor driver board?

Thank to all for any info in advance.

Jim

2

If you do a search for "servo decoding" on arduino.cc, you'll find that several people have posted or uploaded code for decoding RC servo signals.

Is your pan/tilt head home-made, or purchased? I'm looking into designing one driven by servos, but which doesn't put all the load on the servo bearings, so I'm interested in any techniques that others have tried.

Ran

3

Here is the thread I started on this topic: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1228137503

4

@ Ran,

I have used the ServoDecode library with servos before and it works great along with MEM's ServoTimer2 and now MegaServo libraries. These are OK for servos. Maybe my question should have been whether it is feasible to use the Servo code as controlling for Stepper motors.

The mount(s) I have built have all used servos and are self designed. They were a product I marketed about 10 years ago and many were sold around the world and to the US Gov't agencies.

I am switching to steppers for these new applications since they require the fine control and HOLDING power of steppers and simpler to implement without the need of encoding feedback like servo motors do..

assuming that the steppers can be controlled this way, I need ideas of how to implement acceleration and deceleration into the movements.

@MEM

Does it look like using pulseIn and the ServoTimer libraries is a viable path Vs. the ServoDecode libraries?

It looks like the interface for control will be built using Processing and Eclipse or NetBeans in a Java application that can run on many computer OS's.

Thanks in advance.

Jim

5

Jim, you may find something useful here: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1231909180/1

also, have a look at the reprap arduino code: http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome

have fun!

6

Hi MEM,

Thanks for the pointer to those pages. I may be able to adapt the code shown to have the Acceleration curves. I was initially unable to find the Arduino code location on RepRap, but finally did. It is a confusing site. :o

Thank you once again. :slight_smile:

Jim