Thursday, June 27, 2013

Start your motors

I finally had some time tonight to get some work done. I was having some trouble getting my motors to work with the EasyDriver when I last worked on the project. Tonight I was able to figure out why. Apparently the EasyDriver defaults to running in 1/8th of a step (or microsteps). Since my motor was already built to go pretty slow, this made it not move at all effectively (or at least it went very very very slow). After actually reading some of the EasyDriver's documentation, I realized this and that this can be changed. It will require me to do some soldering though which unfortunately I don't have time to do tonight. I should be able to hook up the pins that control the microstepping to the CPIO pins on the raspberry pi. I might be able to just connect both EasyDrivers to the same GPIO pin to make it easier, but I haven't researched that at all yet, I'm just hopeful. This is a very big step in the project since now I can control the motors (albeit in a limited fashion) and read in the sensor data (even if the data isn't completely accurate yet) all into the raspberry pi.