Motion driver

[viscomjim]

Hello Soldercore,

Do you happen to have a simple driver for a basic stepper motor controller. The only requirements would be outputting a step signal (one transition of IO(x) pin/step) and one IO(y) pin for direction (ie. high=cw, low=ccw) commonly referred to as STEP and DIRECTION. This would be great if it had a simple acceleration and deceleration ramp. Something like… start at point a, accelerate to max step rate, run at max step rate, decelerate as approaching target, reach target stop. I believe this is call trapezoidal profile. So variables would be input acceleration (which would also be deceleration), input max velocity, input target position. Please tell me something like this exists for the soldercore and I will forever be in your debt.

Thanks again for a great product.

[CoreBASIC Wizard]

Actually, Iain developed a something for brushed/brushless/stepper motor drivers as a shield, but unfortunately we didn't put it into production.  We wanted to do some motion control (as I have a laser cutter and I had a dream of actually controlling the damn thing without a Leetro card...)

There isn't something that does this at the moment, but one could envisage something like:

INSTALL "STEPPER-DRIVER" USING CORE.D8, CORE.D9 AS STEPPER
STEPPER.MAX = 200 ' Maximum of 200 steps/s
STEPPER.RAMP = 100  ' Linear ramp up or down at 100 step/s/s

With that we could have:

STEPPER.POS = 1000  ' Absolute position stepper to 1000 steps
STEPPER.POS = 500  ' Now go back 500 steps
STEPPER.POS = 750  ' and forward 500 steps

And relatively:

STEPPER.STEP = 500 ' Move forward 500 steps
PRINT STEPPER.POS  ' Print desired end position
PRINT STEPPER.POS
STEPPER.STEP = -250 ' Move back 250 steps

Because the stepper would be taken care of by the driver, the desired position written and read using "POS" and "STEP" would not be the actual position of the stepper.  To detect when the stepper is there, you could use:

WAIT STEPPER.DONE

The "DONE" property would indicate that the stepper is stationary at the desired position.

Thoughts?

[viscomjim]

That is exactly what I am talking about. Just a simple implementation of a motion profile. This would be great to have access to. What are your thoughts on implementing this?

[CoreBASIC Wizard]

My thoughts are you should leave me with it for a week or so, I am already undertaking some additional engineering for another SolderCore customer.  Hopefully then I should be able to publish all the updates together.

[viscomjim]

Thank you. Can't wait.

jim

[viscomjim]

Quote from Soldercore team...

My thoughts are you should leave me with it for a week or so, I am already undertaking some additional engineering for another SolderCore customer.  Hopefully then I should be able to publish all the updates together.

 

I am thinking that after 3 months and nothing heard, that this product, which I had some really high hopes for, would be better supported. Is there any possiblility that you could honestly tell us what you feel the future holds for soldercore and corebasic? Is this product basically dead at this point or is it still being developed? I am basing my concerns on the fact that I use several different platforms, and all of them have active forums and support. If you look at this forum, its basically non existent. I am talking 20 posts a day active on some of them.

 

The motion request is obviously not going to be implemented and I am sure you know that nobody can wait 3 months, after being told a week or so, for something that I really needed at the time. I did wait the week and then another and then another and finally, I ported this project to another platform that worked really well, but I would have loved to have seen it on soldercore. Oh well.

 

Anyway, please just out of professional courtesy, could you give us an honest idea of what is really happening with soldercore and corebasic?

 

Thanks,

 

An almost was a big fan.

[Paul Curtis]

Hi,

On 8 Jul 2014, at 21:36, viscomjim <visc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Quote from Soldercore team...

My thoughts are you should leave me with it for a week or so, I am already undertaking some additional engineering for another SolderCore customer.  Hopefully then I should be able to publish all the updates together.

Indeed.

 

I am thinking that after 3 months and nothing heard, that this product, which I had some really high hopes for, would be better supported. Is there any possiblility that you could honestly tell us what you feel the future holds for soldercore and core basic?

CoreBASIC source code is published.  We are considering making it totally open source to garner more interest and to lessen the load on my engineering time!

Is this product basically dead at this point or is it still being developed? I am basing my concerns on the fact that I use several different platforms, and all of them have active forums and support. If you look at this forum, its basically non existent. I am talking 20 posts a day active on some of them.

Hey, it’s not for want of trying!  The CoreBASIC source code is now ported to 20 different boards!  You can run CoreBASIC on all of them!

Go here:

CrossWorks CoreBASIC Library Package

Then open up the Package Used By folder and see what you can run CoreBASIC on…  Loads of things.  And the source code to all of that (minus TCP and file system) is right there...

 

The motion request is obviously not going to be implemented and I am sure you know that nobody can wait 3 months, after being told a week or so, for something that I really needed at the time. I did wait the week and then another and then another and finally, I ported this project to another platform that worked really well, but I would have loved to have seen it on soldercore. Oh well.

It’s hard for me at the moment: you’re talking to a single developer holding down three major projects.

 

Anyway, please just out of professional courtesy, could you give us an honest idea of what is really happening with soldercore and core basic?

Possibly I can disclose a little more on Friday.  But for now, the source code for CoreBASIC is out there and you can extend it yourself if you want to, and run it on something that isn’t actually a SolderCore, or even port it to your own board.

Regards,

— Paul.