accelerometers and gyroscope to control arm?

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Hazmatt

We have been trying to mount a pot on the arm for a long time, and are finding it nearly impossible. I think we are going to have to go with the potentiometer though, after just realizing that the accelerometer is going to measure the acceleration of the entire robot also, if I set it up this way.

If you can't mount a potentiometer on the actual rotation point on the arm there are other solutions. One would be mounting a shaft encoder somewhere else, and running a cable from it to the arm. As the arm moves, it will pull the cable and turn the encoder (essentially a spool or an inverse winch). You can then translate the rotations of the encoder into distance travelled into rotations of the arm.