I have been trying to create a motor testing board for my team to use during the off-season, and I was wondering if there was a way to run multiple motors at once without using code from the RoboRIO. We have a handheld phaser using an old drill, a motor controller, and a battery input. Is there a way to apply this to a larger scale? Any ideas are appreciated.
Several answers depending on your choice of motors/controllers.
For instance, if you’re using SPARK Max motor controllers, the Rev app will run motors connected to them without a roboRIO.
How do you envision your ideal setup? Is this a test bench or parts of an operational robot?
Is your primary objective to operate/test independent mechanisms?
Operate multiple motors simultaneously moving at different speeds/directions?
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Hmmm, I can think of a few ways to accomplish this, but I’m not sure which is best.
What’s the ultimate goal of scaling up? Or, asked differently, why not just have many old drills, motor controllers, and batteries?
If you are using motor controllers which take PWM, you can get various PWM generators (such as this one, or this one). If you want to get fancier, there are boards which produce several PWM channels and that you can program. There are some systems which are designed to stand in for a roboRIO, for non-competition usage. In general, it will be easiest if you use PWM, rather than CAN.
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Instead of a PWM generator, we use a little board containing an old PDP, some Victors or Spark Max’s, and an RC receiver. The nice thing about using a wireless receiver is that they plug right into the motor controllers, and you don’t have to stand too close to the machine you’re testing (which might be smart the first time it’s being tested).
Andymark sells a really nice cheap transmitter and receiver.
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This seems like it’s a popular recurring topic lately! Here’s a very recent thread about it that has a number of examples and links that may be of interest.
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You can use a BTS7960 and an arduino but you have to program it you can do a motor for less than $5 that way
We’ve made good use of the Rev Software Client for testing mechanisms and prototypes without using code or the RoboRIO. Its nice because its very easy to tune PID and Smart Motion ahead of time at least to get a close baseline for programming to start with once the mechanisms are on the robot.
You can also control multiple SparkMaxes with the telemetry tab at once and the graphing tool also lets you look at things like current draw and all that.
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