Love digging up a horse and beating it again? Well fellas I'm here to help you out!
Lets start another up to date discussion about the use of, and the support of, Dynamixels and the HerkuleX line of professional servos. I'm moving up a level with some upcoming projects and steering away from the hobby style servos. I've spent days researching, using geared stepper motors, geared DC motors as servos and have come back full circle to serial servos. Due in part, by all the unknowns and unreliability associated with creating a servo from scratch.
Tell me about your success and failures of using the Dynamixel and HerkuleX servos with EZB. Please be detailed in your experience and add something to what is already written in the prior threads about subject. What needs to change/improve for better support? Perhaps this is adding to existing plugins or writing new ones? Speaking of plug ins (this is probably another topic), but i wonder if there would be more incentive to create plug ins if there was a pay for development? Like how the app store works? Just a thought there.
I really believe in everything EZ robot and want to continue using the products, because well its so EZ and the results are amazing. I'm well aware the majority of sales is in the education market for EZ Robot and therefore guides their company. But, how can we work together as a group to build support for the next level of servos and professional robotics? And ask ourselves what is the motivation to do so?
Yeah and a special thanks to Will for bringing a dead horse to beat!
:D
I tried a quick test with the IOTiny on D5 and I can't turn on the led or get the servo to move. Am I asking too much of the IOTiny?
I can't locate the datasheet (posting from phone again), but I don't think the uart on the iotiny is on D5.
Alan
Thread: Post #9 https://synthiam.com/Community/Questions/9789&page=1
If i understood well, the IoTiny does not have UART ports.
ARC help:
Dynamixel @ IoTiny:
The Dynamixel plugin code uses the EZ UARTxxxx API methods, to support the IoTiny needs to use SendSerial API method.
DJ can validate my assumption.
Great info! Thanks!
Correct - the IoTiny does not have a hardware uart.
The plugin can be modified to use one of the digital pins, however. The only limitation would be the max baud of 115,200. That baud should not be a problem, as it's still considerable Fast and actually will be more reliable than the default 1,000,000bps of some dynamixel servos. The 1mbps actually has quite a bit of frame errors in my testing IF data lines are routed near devices causing electrostatic interference (i.e. Motors and high frequency CPUs or power supplies).
Got it, thanks DJ!