Hello and thanks for this forum.
I have question on the control of servo’s. I have a Invenscience Torxis servo that I need to control through Matlab. The servo is controlled by the standard radio control signal and has a ‘JrK 21 v3’ embedded for control.
My question is how do I connect the servo to Matlab. Do I need to use another controller such as the Pololu Maestro which is connected to the servo and also the computer which is running Matlab.
Hello, andrew.
You can certainly use the Maestro to generate RC signals that will be recognized by the Torxis.
There are also some options that give you more direct control over the jrk:
A) The simplest is to open up the Torxis servo and connect a USB cable to the jrk inside it. You would then configure the jrk’s input mode to be Serial, and set the Serial Mode to USB Dual Port, and then you can use Matlab to send serial commands to the jrk’s Command Port, which is one of its virtual COM ports.
B) If you don’t like the idea of having an open servo in your system, there is an alternative. You can configure the jrk’s input mode to be Serial, and set the Serial Mode to be “UART, fixed baud rate” and then use any USB-to-TTL serial adapter to talk to the jrk. Note that the jrk does NOT use RS-232 levels so that kind of serial adapter would not work. The Maestro can be used as a USB-to-TTL Serial adapter in USB Dual Port mode so the Maestro would work. You would connect the Maestro’s GND to the ground on the Torxis’s I/O connector, and connect the Maestro’s TX to the signal input on the Torxis’s I/O connector.
You can do option A to start off with and if you switch to option B you won’t have to change much (if any) of your Matlab code because either way your code is just sending bytes to a serial port.
–David
