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Help Please - Pololu Controller - Mirror Project Continued

Hi all. You may remember us from a discussion a while back concerning building a large mechanical mirror (Subject = Linear Motion Control- Servo?) Anyway we have come a bit closer, but not much . We are at the stage where we have a Pololu Micro Serial Servo Controller hooked up to a computer's serial port and a simple servo motor. (There are two batteries attached to the controller). The motor moves once when plugged into the controller. The motor moves once when sent an Enter from Hyperterminal. Now here is the question. Any idea as to how we go about sending the controller/motor the proper output to control where the motor moves? We have the Pololu manual but it's hard for us to really understand. That is we really don't understand what to put into Hyperterminal in order to get the thing to move. Or is Hyperterminal not the way to go? Any help on this basic issue would, of course, be most appreciated. Thanks, Rich and Em

Reply to
Richard Greenberg
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I would say it is not -- better to write a little custom app, for example in REALbasic, that puts a nice GUI on top of whatever movement commands you need. The Pololu serial protocols are binary, not text, so I'm not sure how you would enter the appropriate bytes via Hyperterminal.

I have a tutorial on their motor (not servo) controller here:

As part of that, I provide a little GUI that sends the appropriate serial commands to the device. You could make a very similar app for the servo controller. Or, buy me one and I'll make it for you. :)

Cheers,

- Joe

Reply to
Joe Strout

As mentioned in another post, the Pololu controller needs to be sent bytes so hyperterminal won't work. You can make yourself an application to send the byte commands to a com port on an xp machine just using notepad. I've got the page below showing how to make an application called echoo.com and how to use it in a batch file to send the bytes to the com port. The bottom link is my test page using this setup to control the pan/tilt webcam servos, so you can see it work real time.

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Reply to
Si Ballenger

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