Hello, I am brand new to arduino and the arduino environment. I recently bought an arduino uno and 10k potentiometer and a few servo motors made for an RC helicopter.
I should begin by letting you know that I am a farmer, and I plan on using this programming package to monitor and/or control various agricuktural implements and equipment. What I envisioned doing with this, is on our air drill (piece of planting equipment), we need a way to monitor the depth of the individual shanks. Each shank has individual depth control via an active pressure hydraulic system supplying hydraulic oil pressure to a hydraulic cylinder on each opener. The openers move up and down from the frame via a parallel arm system. However, a certain hydraulic pressure will yield a different depth depending on how firm the soil is.
I have attached a picture of a potentiometer I would hopefully use that we can get from our farm equipment dealer that has a potentiometer being used for essentially the same thing, but through the stock computer system. In the picture it is measuring the height of the "header" from the ground.
So my plan, is to hook a potentiometer to hopefully at least 3 of these openers (there are three rows of these openers, so ones in the rear may be in deeper than the front), then read those values in the arduino analog read ports, and have it average these readings together simultaneously, and also average the instantaneous average over a period of time, say one to three seconds or so, as the natural up and down movement of the openers would most likely lead to too much littering of the servo and cause the reading to be hard to understand.
I had considered using an LCD display, but I was thinking A) the print may be too small to read, and B) it may be too difficult to program seeing as a potentiometer that moved in a circular motion attached to a vertically moving parallel arm would require some use of sine or inverse sine to be accurate. My thinking with the servo was that I could just mount it to a backing plate, then make markings on the backing plate for the respective depths.
I have looked at the servo knob example, and it seems that it is the beginning of what I would like to do, but I do not know how to go about adding more servos, averaging these readings, etc.
Also, when using one of these examples such as servo>knob, does the #include <Servo.h>
Servo myservo
Include code that is not visible in the interface? I notice that the Servo word in both of those lines is in Orange, and I wasn't entirely sure what that meant.
Any help being steered in the right direction, what commands and/or examples to search, or if this is even possible would be much appreciated.
