Arduino Stepper Control Rig

[niceribs]

Which printer ?

[aaronpropst]

@niceribs It's some old dot matrix printer I found in a ditch near my house.  Who in their right mind would throw such a goldmine away.. right??

[SCRTpilot]

Why didn't you use the number of steps to reverse direction?

It's a stepper motor after all, you could have used a regular DC motor for this I guess.

[aaronpropst]

@SCRTpilot It's just a proof of concept mr. serious.. and it had the sensor.. so why the hell not play with it? Of course i could have used a DC Motor, but I wouldn't have had to write a bunch of interesting code for that and learn steppers.

I would think the ir sensor was added on there in case the motor gets moved by outside forces (like yanking paper out of the printer) You'd need to index on a starting point to count steps from there. The IR sensor does that with very little effort.

[Intosia]

Nice :) About to wreck my dotmatrix printer for the stepper :D

[1TwistedmindZ1]

i think you meant phototransistor, that how those optical switches work (1 IR led and 1 IR phototransistor)

[WeAreTwoDoorsDown]

yepp, i think ur right...

[BackFlash2K]

Cool vid, I wish I could find a stepper with an IR switch.

[aaronpropst]

You can buy an ir switch similar to that at sparkfun. The only difference with mine is it was already slapped together by the people that made the old printer.

[jowan512]

right on

[jowan512]

i didnt know kermit the frog was so into physical computing

[aaronpropst]

Aww.. wicked burn..

Yeah.. you're the reason so many people post demo videos of their work that are boring silent films.. They don't want to get made fun of..

[jowan512]

very sorry old chap, was in a sarcastic mood, just electrocuted myself at the mains, anyway i sound like a public school boy which is much worse in my opinion

[aaronpropst]

Nah, salright, On a more recent viewing.. yes.. I sound like a sniffly kermit the frog.. oh well. Better to get it up there and contribute, than to polish it so much it never gets posted.. ; )

[agenttachyon]

Videos like this are extremely useful to beginners and I encourage anybody who has the knowledge and time to make one to do so regardless of how funny their voice sounds.

[littlescale]

nice work with this - thanks for sharing. which IC are you using for the transistor array?

[juancaseco]

Esa es la misma tecnología utilizada en motores endodonticos solo que esos sensores detectan un limite de torque por lo tanto retroceden al alcanzar este limite

[spikegrobstein]

there's actually a new version of the arduino IDE (0007) which has a package for linux and better instructions for what packages it depends on.

I haven't attempted to do anything from linux, yet... I"ve been doing everything from OSX.

[aaronpropst]

Yup, that's how i loaded the code for that video, but i did it on windows xp with the java development environment. Sorry i don't have more info for you.

[aproximation]

Have you ever gotten your arduino to work with the PC?

I am trying to get mine to work via USB with PD bu loading some firmware (in Linux) but the stupid Java firmware loader doesn't work...