Here is some very unimpressive video of my machine working. I’m using the ARM board’s push buttons to move the altitude and azimuth motors. I’m totally aware it doesn’t look like much, but it represents a lot of work.
I had to learn how to use, and properly configure the PWM controller, and timer counter to control this beast. For the control portion, I just mapped some buttons to activate the outputs which run to the motor drivers.
I’m just finishing up source reacquire, and acquire modes tonight. I’d like to get the actual source tracking done as well, but we’ll see. The sick thing is, this system was essentially done 3 weeks ago. We had our photo detectors running into a summing circuit which would get the difference between two detector voltages corresponding to the altitude and azimuth planes. Basically, the closer the difference was to 0, the more on target the system was. The major drawback to using hardware for the subtraction was that I couldn’t code in any sort of intelligence other than proportional control.
Now we pipe down all 4 detectors to an analog multiplexer, a way to basically let us use the 4 detectors, one at a time on a single input. This still has its own set of issues, but the code (my) portion is fabulous. FABULOUS.
Tom





