Daisy Chaining from Maestro Control Center

Hello:

I have a project where I have to control a lot of servos, and I was going to use 2 or 3 Mini Maestros, and hopefully control them from Maestro Control Center. I wanted to ask how would be the best way to do this without doing a full-blown program.

I was thinking on using the scripting language of the Maestro Control Center to send serial commands to the slave maestros to order them to go to their position, but I wanted to ask if this is a correct approach to do this, or if there is an easier approach.

My project needs to be able to also read input from sensors and interact to this (the sensors can be wired on the Master Maestro so no communication of them is needed). What is critical is to be able to control a lot of servos!

Thank you very much for your time and help.

Hello.

I am a little bit confused by your description. You mention wanting to control multiple Maestros from the Maestro Control Center, but then describe using one Maestro to send serial commands to the other Maestros. If what you want to do is use one Mini Maestro to send serial commands to other daisy-chained Maestros, you can do that using a Maestro script and the “SERIAL_SEND_BYTE” command. Please note that once the script is written and uploaded to the Maestro, this system would not need to be connected to the Maestro Control Center.

However, it might be easier to use a separate microcontroller like an Arduino or our Arduino-compatible A-Star controllers to read your sensors and send serial commands to the Maestros to move the servos.

-Brandon

Hi Brandon:

Thank you very much for your reply. I am sorry I was not very clear.

Right now I have a Maestro connected to my PC. I would like to run motors on this Maestro with script. But I will need to run more motors than just 1 Maestro can handle, so I was hoping to be able to use daisy chaining to control more servos.

The setup I had in mind was to have Maestro A connected to the PC and Maestro B and C connected to the Maestro A daisy chained. With the Maestro Control Center Script I could control the servos on Maestro A with direct code, and control the servos on Maestro B and C with the “SERIAL_SEND_BYTE” command. I wanted to ask if this is both possible and if there is a possible drawback or limitation by doing it this way.

Our ideal solution would be if we could control servos on daisy chained Maestros directly with the sliders from the Maestro Control Center, but I read from another post that that is not possible, except with multiple instances of the program.

We would like to do a fast prototype, so we would prefer if it is possible to do this without an external MCU like an Arduino.

Thanks again!

A script on the Maestro can be used in the way you are asking, but it sounds like you are confused about how it works since you call it a Maestro Control Center Script. The Maestro Control Center is the software you can use to write the script and upload it to a Maestro, at which point, the Maestro no longer needs to be connected to the computer to run the script. You can write a script and upload it to one Mini Maestro so that it sends serial commands to other Maestros in a daisy chain. My posts in this thread mention a few limitations of using the Maestro script language over something like an Arduino (or some other separate microcontroller). Most of the information relevant to this topic is in the last paragraph of the post I linked to, which I will copy below for convenience:

Also, please note that only the 12-, 18-, and 24-channel Mini Maestros can use the “SERIAL_SEND_BYTE” command, so it is not available if you are using a 6-channel Micro Maestro.

By the way, you mentioned running motors with the Maestro; just so there is no confusion, the Maestro cannot control DC motors directly, but it can be used with standard RC servos.

-Brandon

A post was merged into an existing topic: Daisy Chain and Maestros running led’s