pyControl
Controlling external motors #80
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I am creating an experiment setup where 3 stepper motors (by Zaber) connected to linear actuators (x,y and z axis) move a trigger object to the mouse. |
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Hi @guykoy123, Apologies for the delay getting to this. It should be possible to control these linear actuators from a pyControl setup. I think the way you would do it would be to use one of the UART outputs of the pyboard microcontroller, which is a two wire serial interface with seperate recieve (RX) and transmit (TX) pins, controlled from micropython using the pyb.UART class. The output from the pyboard uses 0 and 3.3V for the low and high logic levels, but the actuators use the RS323 standard which uses ~ +/-10V logic levels. You would therefore need to use a logic level converter IC to convert from the low voltage UART signals from the pyboard to the higher voltages expected by the actuator. One option would be the MAX232 chip which sparkfun have a breakout board for, though this appears to be out of stock currently. Several of the pyControl breakout board ports have UARTs on the two digital intput output lines. You could make the physical connection to these lines using using a pyControl port adapter board (see the docs) which has a screw terminal to make it easy to connect wires to a port. For prototyping you could implement the circuit with the level converter IC on a breadboard. A couple of relevent stack overflow posts about UART and RS232: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/110478/difference-between-uart-and-rs-232 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55237103/uart-to-rs-232-convension |
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Hi @guykoy123,
Apologies for the delay getting to this.
It should be possible to control these linear actuators from a pyControl setup. I think the way you would do it would be to use one of the UART outputs of the pyboard microcontroller, which is a two wire serial interface with seperate recieve (RX) and transmit (TX) pins, controlled from micropython using the pyb.UART class. The output from the pyboard uses 0 and 3.3V for the low and high logic levels, but the actuators use the RS323 standard which uses ~ +/-10V logic levels. You would therefore need to use a logic level converter IC to convert from the low voltage UART signals from the pyboard to the higher voltages expected by the a…