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Unread 11-04-2013, 12:01
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Re: PWM Testing Equipment

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim Wilks View Post
What I'm really looking for is a test box that:

1) can accept any PWM signal and display what it is receiving
2) generate a PWM signal based on some "hand control" input
There's lots of devices that can do #2. In hobby circles, they are called servo testers. If you don't want to dedicate a computer like Ether's suggestion, you can buy or easily make one. Here's one made by a mentor of 987: http://robotlogic.com/product_servotester.html. You can also make one using 2 555 timers. Here's a schematic http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encod...Excerciser.htm. You can also easily make one with a microcontroller, like an arduino.

We needed to do this to test our shooter prototype. We had one team start working on an arduino to do it, while another team started working on a 555 timer version. In the end, the Arduino team won, by several hours, but now we have two.

It would not be hard to make a microcontroller read a PWM signal and display the value. I haven't seen any off the shelf solutions that do it, however. Here's one example of doing it on an arduino. http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/s...BlogPost:38418