I am new to Arduino and have a project I am interested in. I would like to control the direction of a stepper motor using a joystick, arduino, and tic t500. I can find several example codes using other boards such as easy driver, but so far have found nothing using a Pololu t500 board. Any help to get me started would be appreciated.
Hello.
We do not have any specific examples for doing that, but if you are using the Arduino to process your joystick inputs and send commands to the Tic controller, you will probably want to communicate with the Tic via TTL serial or I2C commands. Once you configure the Tic using the Tic Control Center according to how you want to use it, you can have the Arduino map the joystick inputs to send the appropriate command to the Tic. You can use the Tic Stepper Motor Controller library for Arduino to make the communication easier. You might consider looking through the examples in that library to get a better understanding for how it would work.
Alternatively, if you joystick outputs an analog voltage between 0-5V, you might be able to get the behavior you want by connecting it directly to the Tic (without using the Arduino). You can find more information about configuring the Tic for this kind of operation in the Tic Stepper Motor Controller User’s Guide, particularly the “Analog/RC input handling” and “Setting up analog speed control” sections.
Brandon
I found a similar project on line that uses all the components I have except with a different stepper motor driver board. Their board connects between the Arduino output pins to Pins IN1-4 on the driver board. Which pins on the T500 are the equivalent to IN1, IN2, IN3, and IN4?
Do you know the function of those pins? It is unlikely the driver used in the project you found uses an interface similar to the Tic; it sounds like it might be a simple a dual H-bridge motor driver. If you aren’t sure, can you post a link to that project?
Brandon
Here is where I found it:
I can’t tell what kind of stepper motor controller board they are using. I do not see these same pins on the tic board, but I am sure there is some way to do what I want to do with your board. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for the link. The code in that project is not going to work with the Tic controller, but if all you want to do is move the stepper motor from a single axis of an analog joystick (like that project shows), you can do that with just the Tic (i.e. without the Arduino board). As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I suggest reading through the “Setting up analog speed control” section of the Tic user’s guide to get a better understanding of how to configure it for this kind of operation. If you try following those instructions and have problems getting it to work, I would be glad to help.
Brandon