Servo speed thought

[christrom]

Hi, I posted about a week ago asking for battery advice and since then I have bought a micro maestro, connected up two power sources, successfully completed a sequence and run it through the maestro as a standalone unit

I’m obviously very happy that I’ve managed to do this so thanks very much so far for the help.

Now - I’ve seen some posts about altering individual frame speed settings, where you go in and tweak the script. Could another way be just to create many frames which play quickly and build in the servo movements that way? IE do 20 discrete movements one way at small intervals of rotation, and then do 20 movements back in a larger increment, effectively making the servo accelerate in one direction faster than the other? Obviously I’d have to put some speed setting on the whole sequence to even out the motion and prevent it from jittering.

I’m basically thinking of using the frames like a flip book.

The main downsides would be the time involved in creating these frames, and the other would be the capacity of the memory onboard the maestro. So, if I went down the route of thousands of frames, is there any way of increasing the capacity of the maestro? Could I copy the script onto a flash drive and plug it in?

Your thoughts would be helpful

[BrandonM]

Hello.

Setting up frames in a sequence to do speed control like you described might be possible, but I do not see much benefit in doing so. You mentioned a couple down sides to doing it this way, such as memory and time, and I cannot think of a way to get around them; the Maestro does not support reading scripts from flash drives. Learning the basics of the Maestro scripting language and adding speed settings into the script is probably the best way to go about adding speed limits to your sequence. If you try this and run into problems, you could post the script you have here, and I would be happy to take a look.

Alternatively, if you are already familiar with using a microcontroller such as an Arduino, you could control the servos by sending the Maestro serial commands. This would allow you to use the “Set Speed” command as well as the other serial commands documented in the “Serial Servo Commands” section of the Maestro user’s guide.

-Brandon

[christrom]

Thanks Brandon. I’m very new to all of this, but I think I’ll try editing the script. My design is not complete yet anyway, so if I run into problems I’ll post it here.

Thanks very much, you are all very helpful