Homemade motorized slide potentiometer

Development Boards Arduino
1

Hello SparkFun community!

I would like to make a motorized slide potentiometer and the main problem I have is with the ‘motorized’ part.

To give you a bit of a background: I have a display and a slide pot connected to Arduino. I want to be able to change a number on the display from 1 to 50 with the slide pot. What I found out is that my slide pot is not all that accurate and even with rolling average the number flickers a bit. So I thought a better solution might be a multi-turn potentiometer on a rack&pinion or maybe a belt&pulley. This doesn’t matter all that much. What I thought then was that I would like to be able to change the number via bluetooth as well and then it would be cool if the slider went by itself to the value I set remotely.

My question is what kind of motor would be best to use in this application? What are some other parts I have to keep in mind while adding it? (like a H-bridge for DC motor if that’s what I should use)

Thanks!

2

Why are you trying to recreate the wheel? Even Sparkfun sells motorized linear potentiometers (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10976), though they can be found cheaper elsewhere.

3

To be honest they seem pretty expensive and as this project is primarily for me to lear something new it doesn’t make any sense to buy such thing if it can be made.