Re: [CCHS] Motor Drive Shield

[Jonathan Oxer]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 2:56 PM, rosie x <rosie...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I guess what I need to know is 1) can I find the adafruit equivalent in
> Australia 2) if not, what difference will it make not having the stepper
> motors and 3) does anyone else ever need this sort of thing and want to
> bundle up an order so it is more expedient.

(alert-mode = "reply bordering on commercial content)

Just for reference, CCHS member Luke Weston recently designed a very
slick motor driver shield that may do what you want, but it's not
(yet) been manufactured. It's just about at the point of manufacturing
once a couple of final tweaks have been done to the PCB, so I expect
it's still some weeks away. Once it's done though there'll be stock in
the order of hundreds here in Melbourne, plus a few at every Jaycar
store.

Cheers

Jon

[rosie x]

Hey John

Cool I guess I have to learn to be patient  :) Luke if you happen to read this, can I get one real fast please !!

Thanks!@__> 

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[Luke Weston]

You'll have to buy one via Freetronics as soon as they are in stock, but I have no control over when that will be any more than Jon does. Sorry.

Anyway, the dragon project doesn't involve stepper motors, it involves a couple of DC motors. So you could in fact do it using the DFRobot shield that is stocked by Little Bird.

But, unfortunately, there's no really detailed documentation on that page allowing you to reproduce everything in detail exactly as is without being a bit creative yourself.

It looks like you will need two spare analog pins on the Arduino for the LDRs and one spare digital pin for the servo and one digital pin to control the fan and one digital pin to ignite the pyrotechnics, so you'll need to make sure that that number of pins is available and they're not being used by the motor controller hardware. You may need more pins than that too, there seems to be a lot going on in that robot that isn't well documented.

Personally for the pyrotechnics I would replace the flash paper with something like butane gas controlled via a solenoid valve and something like a CCFL inverter to provide an arc to ignite it, so it can be used continuously without having to be taken offline and reloaded with new flash paper. But that's just me if I was building it. :)

It's a cool project though :)

Cheers,
  Luke

[rosie x]

Cool thanks for the reply Luke. I'll just have to take it step-by-step and as I learn I'll improvise. I decided to order a couple of motor drives from  adafruit anyway, as they might come in handy at some point... I'll also get something from Jon when the stock arrives. My preference is always to support local, when  I can. As a total novice I am building a kit and will be very much dependent on the advice and experience of others. Hopefully, both you and Jon will come along to a Tues night at Hawthorn hackerspace sometime so I can pick your brains f-2-f.
See ya, Rosie

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[Andy Gelme]

hi Jon,

On 2012-08-29 15:13 , Jonathan Oxer wrote:
> (alert-mode = "reply bordering on commercial content)

If Luke has a (GitHub ? ) link to the schematic / gerber files with an
open-hardware license that others can replicate and/or learn from ...
then, that's definitely on the "community" side of the border.

Otherwise ...

It's definitely time to set-up a "commercial" email list, web-site page,
etc ... so that (self) promotion of open licensed products designed
locally (I think we all want to support that) can occur ... without the
downsides of the main email list becoming less about community and more
about marketing (nothing wrong with that ... if it is in the right place).

I realize you and others have been very sensitive about keeping a clear
distinction between genuine support for the local community and
marketing of commercial product.

"Trusted / credible" information about what products to buy and where
... is valuable for the CCHS members to know. As long as we can avoid
excessive emails or astroturfing from less considerate people.

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[Jonathan Oxer]

Hi all,

I apologise to the list for my last post, and to Andy in particular
for putting him in a difficult position. Andy is already working very
hard at maintaining the line between what's useful community
discussion and what's blatant commercial self-promotion, and I didn't
make his job any easier by blurring the line.

So, Andy: I apologise.

On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 2:04 AM, Andy Gelme <an...@geekscape.org> wrote:

> If Luke has a (GitHub ? ) link to the schematic / gerber files with an
> open-hardware license that others can replicate and/or learn from ...
> then, that's definitely on the "community" side of the border.

The files are on GitHub, they'll be available under the TAPR Open
Hardware License, and *will* definitely fall on the community side of
the border very soon. However, as of now the repo hasn't yet been made
public (although it's been shared with a few people privately,
including myself) so it was premature of me to mention it.

Cheers :-)

Jon

[Jarrod Tuma]

Hi Rosie

Maybe you could use something like the l293d and solder it into a protoboard shield (or a breadboard. Its a quad half-hbridge chip, good for two DC motors or one stepper

Actually its the exact chip the adafruit shield uses. Quite easy to interface too, no other components are really needed, just check out the datasheet (from memory the datasheet is pretty easy to read)

Servo's are easy, just a 5-6v supply and a pwm pin

Throw in an lm7805 or 7806 and a capacitor for the motor/servo supply for noise isolation

RS, next day free delivery ;-) 

Well its an option, and a good challenge 

Cheers, Jarrod

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[rosie x]

whoah - thanks!

[rosie x]

ooh a cardboard robot sounds fun!! 

On 2 September 2012 00:49, ken ihara <ken....@thepianomaestro.com> wrote:

hi Rosie,

I have been working on a 4-axis stepper motor board for a recent Kickstarter project (google "Kickstarter cardboard robot")

It uses 4 D293 chips and 3 PIC chips (1 for USB/control, 2 for emulating four 297 chips)

It does not connect to the Arduino -- it connects directly to the USB port. 

Let me know if this might be of use.

Cheers,
Ken

On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 2:56:03 PM UTC+10, rosie x wrote:

Hi All

I am trying to find the equivalent of an AdaFruit Motor Drive Shield in Australia.

I've been told this is the one I want http://adafruit.com/products/81 to build http://letsmakerobots.com/node/6427

I wrote to littlebird electronics and got this email back from John:

Thanks for your enquiry. 

Afraid we don't have a shield compatible with the adafruit shield. We do have shields that can control two DC motors with a voltage between 7 to 12 V at up to 2 A of current: 
http://littlebirdelectronics.com/products/l298-motor-shield-arduinocompatible 

However if you need to control stepper motors then the adafruit shield  would be the one. 

I guess what I need to know is 1) can I find the adafruit equivalent in Australia 2) if not, what difference will it make not having the stepper motors and 3) does anyone else ever need this sort of thing and want to bundle up an order so it is more expedient.

Cheers, Rosie

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[Luke Weston]

Hi Jon,

Personally, I don't think there's anything you need to apologise for.

There's no problem I can see here, especially not one that requires any apologies or formal policies or long drawn out email threads to debate it.

You donated your time to provide constructive, helpful input in response to Rosie's question. Personally, I think that's something positive, not something anybody ever needs to make apologies for.

Mentioning a Freetronics product as part of your response is no different to mentioning any other product available from Jaycar or Sparkfun or Adafruit or Little Bird or whoever it is, in my opinion. Obviously you would expect people to name-drop several vendors and companies in the usual course of writing a constructive on-topic reply to a thread like this, and that's sensible, productive, and I can't see how it's unusual or harmful at all. It's difficult to write a constructive helpful response to a question like this without name-dropping at least some shop or vendor for hardware. In fact, I would consider Freetronics to be "better" than anyone else such as Little Bird or Jaycar or whatever, because all Freetronics products are of course always open source - although they're usually not open-sourced during preliminary development, only after the product is designed and finalised and released onto the market. There are other advantages too, such as supporting local Australian business. 

It doesn't make sense to say, well, this post should have been moved over to a separate mailing list or a separate thread or something, because it's an on-topic productive response to Rosie's question, so it makes sense to post it in this thread, on topic, where Rosie and anyone else can find it, and not to post it anywhere else.

If it was something explicitly commercial such as a commercial advertisement for a certain company's products or a recruitment post looking to hire somebody, and it had no relevance to answering anybody's questions or replying to any existing discussion in an existing mailing list thread,  then sure, it would probably make sense, as Andy suggested, to have a separate thread or a separate mailing list dedicated to that purpose so people can easily filter out that content from their email as they deem appropriate.

Basically, I think you've got nothing to apologise for and there's absolutely no problem here that's worth worrying about, but that's just what I personally think, and of course this is a democratic community and what I personally think has no special weight any more than what anybody else thinks.

Regards,

  Luke

[Jarrod Tuma]

I agree with Luke.

Jon was answering the original question pretty much directly.. "is there an equivalent to the adafruit shield in Australia?" ... yeah we are working on one. I think its a very useful answer! Completely relevant to the question.

There is a line (what Andy was talking about) but it hasn't been crossed here. I think Andy was probably just bringing it up as a preventative measure and a chance to bring up the commercial side of things, because it was pretty clear Jon was genuinely trying to provide a useful answer.

If a reply actually upsets people, then we have a problem but this just seems like getting too serious over nothing.. The hackerspace scene should be more laid back I think  :D 

Anyway, best of luck to Rosie on building a cool little robot, if you need any more advice there are obviously some people here willing to help out.

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[Andy Gelme]

hi Jarod,

On 2012-09-8 17:26 , Jarrod Tuma wrote:
> There is a line (what Andy was talking about) but it hasn't been
> crossed here. I think Andy was probably just bringing it up as a
> preventative measure and a chance to bring up the commercial side of
> things, because it was pretty clear Jon was genuinely trying to
> provide a useful answer.

Yes !

Something along the lines of maintaining a strong community first focus
on the main email list ... and starting another email list for
commercially oriented discussion, news, products, services, jobs and
self-promotion.

Like this one ... https://groups.google.com/group/cchs-commercial ... go
for it !

> If a reply actually upsets people, then we have a problem but this
> just seems like getting too serious over nothing.. The hackerspace
> scene should be more laid back I think :D

Good advice.

> Anyway, best of luck to Rosie on building a cool little robot, if you
> need any more advice there are obviously some people here willing to
> help out.

Watching people build things and helping each other out ... is great to see.