[En-Nut-Discussion] Experiences with motion control software and hardware...

[Harald Kipp]

Hello Herman,

well, we connected a Trinamic Kit via RS232 to control
a stepper. But that's probably not what you are asking
for. :-)

CDS Modules developed a simple controller add-on for the
Ethernut, of which I got two samples from them. It does
not include micro stepping and no driver. They are very
busy with their own stuff and didn't do any further
development since then.

A few months ago I contacted Trinamic and they offered
us to support Ethernut with their modules. However, these
modules come with their own CPU, which processes some
kind of motion control language. IMO, that part could
be easily done by the Ethernut CPU. That would also offer
much more flexibility, because Ethernut can communicate
directly with the Trinamic chip.

Basicly you need some kind of hardware controller
with micro stepping, because the timing requirements
are too tight for Nut/OS. But with Trinamic or similar
chips this should be quite easy to implement.

That's almost all I can add to this topic. Running
a stepper from Ethernut looks really attractive to
me. Even more, after Michael Fischer had been successful
with WLAN running at 70-80 kBytes per second. Good
starting point for mobile robots based on low end
hardware.

Harald


At 15:57 07.07.2004 +0200, you wrote:
>I'm new on this list, and am wondering who has already done some motion
>control applications with Ethernut. Of course, applications where the
>source code is published somewhere on the net :-)
>I see some motion control hardware on the webpage "Projects" page; what
>are the experiences with that hardware?
>
>Herman