Firstly, I hope I'm in the right place to make this post, if I'm not I sincerely apologise.
Secondly, the crux of the post......
I'm looking to be able to control the speed of a small 9-12v dc motor via a webpage however I'm completely new to the whole Arduino thing, so don't really have much of a clue where to begin.
I've done some checking around and come up with some idea of what I need, but all the things I've read are quite technical, so I got quite lost.
So, to the questions.
1/ I know that I need an Arduino Ethernet shield, but which one? I've noticed that there are a couple, so I'm a bit stuck.
2/ I also know that I need to have some sort of motor controller, but am completely lost as to which/what.
3/ The programming is something I have no real idea about. I've found a couple of tutorials, but they're all 'push button' controls, what I'd ideally like is for the webpage to have a slider control (which is no problem using jQuery) but to have that interact with the Arduino/Motor controller is completely beyond me.
4/ As I understand things, the Arduino board itself can act as a webserver and host the necessary webpage, but I don't know if this is better or worse than having a 'hosted' website.
If anyone could provide some answers to these, or at least point me in the right direction to find the answers myself I would be endlessly grateful.
TheMightySpud:
3/ The programming is something I have no real idea about. I've found a couple of tutorials, but they're all 'push button' controls, what I'd ideally like is for the webpage to have a slider control (which is no problem using jQuery) but to have that interact with the Arduino/Motor controller is completely beyond me.
I haven't done any web-based applications with Arduinos, but I'd imagine the slider control could be handled somewhat like the an analog signal after it's been through the analog to digital converter (ADC). For example let's think of a potentiometer setup to be an analog control. The exact details about resistances, voltage, etc... levels don't matter right now. What does matter is the fact that after the signal is run through the ADC one extreme of the potentiometer will have a value of "0", the other will have a value of "1023" (or close to it), and any position of the potentiometer between the two extremes will have some value between zero and the highest value.
You can use the same basic concept for your slider control, without even having to worry about the ADC because the web page can directly feed numerical values to the Arduino. Just set one end of the slide control to be a given value (it doesn't have to be zero, and many data types can hold negative values) and the other some value higher than the other (the difference will be determined by how much resolution you want the slider to have, up to the limit of the variable's data type you are using). For the sake of arguement, let's pretend your slider is a linear range of integer values reperesenting the percentages from 0 to 100 %. If the user moves the slider a third of the way across the input to the Arduino is the number "33", half-way it is "50", three-quarters is "75", and so on...
Then you just program the Arduino to do whatever you want it to do based on the value it recieves. In your case, with a few extra parts you could control the speed of a normal DC motor, or as zoomkat mentioned control a continous rotation servo using only PWM output signal.
