Hi, i am an engineering student, and would like to know if and how to interface a stepper motor from a remote location.. i intend on developing a application that could help me controll a stepper motor from a remote location.. would also appreciate help wid any information about which platform wud be a convinient one.
hey thanx for the site it did give me an idea abt the way i shud be looking at.. but it really does not help me much as i cannot afford a device of dat cost in my currency... :) newaz thanx a lot.
It strikes me that RS232 and a $10 microcontroller is the simplest way to do this...
RS232 is good for long cables (100 feet) and over radio. For a really long cable use a modem; and you can buy cheap wireless modules that have an RS232 interface. So you could remote control your stepper motor from a PC over it's serial port. If your PC hasn't got a serial port you can get a cheap USB-to-RS232 adapter.
Then you just need a microcontroller with a UART to control the stepper motor - this could be a PIC, 8051 or ARM7-based micro.
We'd need more specifics. What's the application? What sort of weight does it have to handle? How precise does its positioning need to be? When you say "without any control system" what do you mean? Servos at the joints but no onboard computer to run the servos? Not even any servos?
Hard to tell without more information but you may look around for some used Scorbots (ERIII of ER4 like this one
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) which are for sale on eBay pretty much all the time. They have 6 x 12V DC motors, encoders on each motor, designed to operate 0.5 lbs (~1/4 kilo) loads and have a pretty good reach for a small desk-top setup.
What's probably more important is that many, if not most you'll see for sale have controllers either broken, missing or of an un-useable type (ER4PC needs a full-AT card that's hard to find and is more expensive than the robot itself) - so you can probably get yourself a very good deal since you don't need the controller.
Good luck!
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