I’m attempting to run the micro maestro on Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit.
The command center loads correctly and appears fully usable, and the board appears to be okay.
When plugged in to USB, the green light is steady, and the yellow gives single pulses.
Opening control center, the green flashes, and the yellow give double pulses, however it is unresponsive to any commands. Control center can see the device, listed as 00054551 (changes to Not Connected when pulled out).
I found that by changing Timeout(s) to any finite value the red light turns on solid, and the error code 0x0020 is displayed.
This is a really weird problem, it looks like both the board and PC can communicate quite happily, but not send commands to each other.
Hello. I am sorry you are having trouble. What do you mean by “unresponsive to any commands”? Could you describe exactly what you are doing and what behavior you are seeing that makes you say that? Also, could you check the Serial Settings tab and tell me what serial mode the Maestro is in? You will have to click the “Enable” check box in order to move a servo. How are you powering your servos?
–David
The servos are powered by a 9V battery through a 2/3 voltage divider. A bit crude, but I don’t have anything more robust. I have used the battery and divider to power an Arduino Uno, and the servo runs happily through that.
After launching Control Center, I try moving the sliders, which fails to move the servos. I set the serial mode to UART, detect baud rate, although when I attempt to enable a servo, I get the message:
"The servo controller is currently configured to detect the serial baud rate. Until it has detected the baud rate, it will not be able to control servos. Do you want to change the serial mode to UART, 9600 baud and apply all settings now?"
Clicking OK sets the serial mode to the fixed rate.
Is there anywhere I can get a list of the error codes for the board?
Also, the servo is a Towerpro SG91R.
Hello. If any errors occur on the Maestro, you will can see them listed in the “Errors” tab and the red LED on the board should be on.
However, I do not think any errors are happening. The real problem is your power source. Nine volt batteries cannot provide much current so they are not good for powering motors in general. Putting a voltage divider on it makes the situation much worse; depending on what resistor values you choose, either you will be wasting a lot of power through the resistors or you will be supplying insufficient power to the servos. I recommend using 4 AA batteries.
–David
That solved it, it was just my shoddy power supply. Many thanks for your help!
