motor speed control from PC

Archive New Product Ideas
1

I am building a simple device that requires a PC to control a bi-directional motor thru USB. I have a Sabertooth 2X10 motor driver which can take serial data in. I intend to use a USB to RS232 serial converter to interface between the driver and a PC.

The question is:

What do I do on the software side on the PC? Is there something available that would work? I can’t find anything online for this purpose.

Ideally the software would have a window with a simple slider or other obvious method to control the motor speed and direction with the PC’s mouse or up/down arrow keys.

Thanks.

2

You will probably have to write it yourself.

Leon

3

There are lots of options to do this without resorting to C++ or Java where you would have to find an object capable of what your want, or write an awful lot of code.

But Tk supports sliders, and can be integrated into Tcl or Perl or Python to do what you want. I can’t speak to the others, but in TclTk this would be about a 20 line program, assuming you take the slider value and spit it out a serial port to be interpreted by an Arduino, ARMmite or whatever.

There might be sample apps you could find in VisualBASIC to do the same.

4

an update for TclTk

the Tk widget you want to use is called a scale

some examples of Tk widgets and the source code to do them is at

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~saul/per … _examples/

TclTk can take a while to master, but to be dangerous doesn’t take too long at all. There is an example of the scale in the webpage above

5

Thanks so much. This is a great help and appears to be exactly what I need.

Paul S

6

If you are on PC then C#, dotNET SDK plus SharpDevelop or Visual C# Express 2008 edition might do the trick. It does it for me :wink:

Check here http://msmvps.com/blogs/coad/archive/20 … -.NET.aspx or here http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/showtopic35775.htm or just type “C# serial port example” in google, yahoo, msn etc.