I am designing a lighting system which consists of 7 lamps. Each lamp assembly has 4 motors, out of which two are stepper motors for linear positioning and the other two are DC encoder servo motors for angle positioning. I am a mechanical engineer and completely new to the realm of electronics. I have the required bi-polar stepper motors, what else should I procure to do this project? Will the Arduino work in this case or Raspberry Pi?
Hello.
That sounds like a very ambitious project for an beginner to electronics. It is generally beyond the scope of our technical support to help with system design, but there are a variety of ways you could go about making something like that, and I can give you some general advice to help get you started.
Before choosing drivers and controllers, you will need to select the appropriate motors. You will also need to determine how you want to interact with the lamps (i.e. through physical buttons and knobs, wirelessly through WiFi or Bluetooth, through a computer interface, etc). You should also consider if all of the lamps are going to have their own control electronics built-in or if they’re all going to connect to the same external controller.
Those kinds of details will help you narrow down what devices are worth considering at each step. For example, it sounds like you plan on using brushed DC motors with encoders to do closed-loop position control like a servo. You could use a motor controller that processes the encoder feedback for you or you could use a simpler motor driver and program your controller to process the encoder feedback. If you choose the latter, then a microcontroller such as an Arduino would be more appropriate than a traditional Raspberry Pi, since Raspberry Pi boards are not very good at applications that require precise timing.
Brandon