This week I was able to somewhat concurrently run 4 servo motors and then sequentially run the stepper motor that powers the gantry. I am saying somewhat concurrently because timer 2 on the STM only has 3 usable channels. This leaves one of the servo motors running on a different timer, causing it to run out of sync with the other servos. I am investigating how to sync these two timers. While writing the stepper motor driver, I realized we never considered a stepper motor driver in our design. Given that our stepper motor will need to support the weight of the actuator carriage and 32 servo motors, I decided to purchase a heavy duty stepper motor driver. I also wrote a function that can convert the calculated depth to an angle the servo can rotate to. We also decided to use dowels as our pins. We tried hand sawing and using a miter saw to cut the dowels. The miter saw didn’t give a clean cut, so we will be hand-sawing for now. However we will try other saws.
I am on schedule. Hopefully, the pwm expanders will come in this week, so I can implement actuation with the pwm expanders.