[protoserge]

Originally Posted by kevinmh

Yes, it's been very helpful. Thanks again.

Let's see. More about what I need:

1) There won't be any feedback as long as I'm not missing very many steps. Open loop.

2) Steppers: besides the amp rating to get a ballpark torque generated, I don't have anything spec'd out. Seems like all of the cheapest motors or motor drivers/controllers have been bi polar.

3) Command/response: This might not be what you have in mind, but I really only need the position of all of the steppers to be coordinated, as I'm essentially 'weaving' on a somewhat cylindrical surface with some fiber (carbon, glass, etc.) So, the speed of the motors isn't as important as long as it isn't so slow that it takes days to make something. Maybe a revolution every second or two would be nice. I know that accelerating the steppers too much can cause missed steps so I don't want that. I was planning on using chopper drives to further minimize step loss, since they aren't hard to get.

Also, I don't need the steppers to necessarily respond in a certain amount of time-I just need to get the path of the payout eye that I want and also relative to the paths of other payout eyes.

Maybe you had more specific things you were wondering about as far as command/response goes?

I definitely don't have my heart set on NI. I just already have Labview and a DAQ card, so that was the first architecture I was looking at. But, besides that route, they are literally 10X too expensive for my budget!

You can use NI LabVIEW To build your control algorithm and interface with the Arduino over Ethernet. The Arduino would receive the packet from the host machine (LabVIEW) and perform the commands as directed (still C++ on the Arduino).