Newsgroups: comp.robotics
Path: brunix!uunet!nic.unh.edu!newshost.unh.edu!rg
From: rg@msel.unh.edu (Roger Gonzalez)
Subject: motor control circuit
Message-ID: <RG.92Jun1095050@nymph.msel.unh.edu>
Sender: news@nic.unh.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: UNH Marine Systems Engineering Lab
Distribution: comp
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1992 14:50:50 GMT
Lines: 34


Beware programmers wielding soldering irons!  :-)

I'm in the process of building a small robot that will eventually use a small
single board computer (of the ilk that one can buy in the back of "Embedded
Systems" or "Midnight Engineering") to control all its hardware.  I hope to
then use two serial line interfaces for sensor and effector I/O to a laptop.

Anyway, glue hardware is not my specialty.

I need to build a motor controller that will take the analog outputs from the
board's D-A ports, and use this to do some PWM on the power going to the
motors.  I'd like a closed loop controller, so I've bought motors that have
built-in tachometers (I suspect that there is just a LED-disk-detector
mechanism inside.)  Ideally, I would like the two wheel motors to keep
themselves at pretty much the same rate when they are both at the same
commanded speed.

This seems like it would be a fairly common circuit, so I thought I would fish
about for a recipe approach rather than tearing out my hair for the next three
months... 

Thanks,
Roger

--
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting
 than the question of whether a submarine can swim" - Edsger W. Dijkstra 

Roger Gonzalez   -  rg@msel.unh.edu
Division of Bit Banging and Reluctant Robotics
UNH Marine Systems Engineering Laboratory, Durham, NH  03824-3525
(603) 862-4600 -4399 (fax)

