Maximum length of sequences for servo controller?

Hi all,

I am new to any of this.

My friend and I are trying to make a vending machine for an exhibition, with a maestro servo controller and 6 continuous rotation servos. However, we do not want this vending machine to have buttons, instead we want the servos to operate on a timer, and over the course of a 9 day exhibition, each servo will come into action only once, rotating number of times, in order to push an item out of the vending machine coil and off the shelf into the vending machine tray.

Before we purchase a servo controller, and as we have no experience writing code, we wondered whether Polulu’s software would allow us to make a sequence which is so long? ie. in which everything sits for a day and then one servo is activated and rotates for a short amount of time, and then everything sits still for another day until another servo is activated and rotates for a short amount of time… for around 9 days in total. I understand the program works in milliseconds, so I was unsure whether this would be possible.

Hello.

What you noticed is correct, the units of the delays in the Maestro’s sequencer is in milliseconds. This post is a good explanation for how to achieve long delays with a Maestro script. Also, note that since the timer on the Micro Maestro can be off by around 1%, if you wanted the vending machine to dispense something once a day every day for 9 days straight at a specific time, the amount of time it could be off on the final day is potentially as bad as about 2 hours off.

-Jon