Robotics - servo control

yoda · 8 Oct 2008 at 23:57

not sure if anyone will know...

I want to put a computer in my radio control plane. The computer will be microprocessor based (a z80 compatable to be exact).

What i'm after is a way to convert the digital output from CPU to PWM for a servo.

The ideal solution would be a single chip that accepts 8bit (1 byte giving 256 servo positions) input from the processor ( TTL via octal latches) and converts that for a servo...

I've been searching for the last 5 hours and returned nothing but stuff for PIC's... While yes PIC's can drive them directly, PIC's can't do the navigation maths I intend so easily...

ANY help appreciated...
Thanks

yoda · 9 Oct 2008 at 00:03

PMSL...
The navigation is via GPS input, hence the maths required... nothing that pythagerous (<Spell) can't sort out...

yoda · 9 Oct 2008 at 09:44

SRV1 system looks nice, that GPS board looks the dogs watsits... shame about the cost though...
Also the b/g wifi module is nice, except their is going to be massive over heads to generate the wifi stacks. However, my guy's are going to be self aware and use a sort of swarm logic as in they tell each other their gps XYZ positions at regular intervals in order to avoid colisions.

Not seen anything on servo control though...
I know about 4 / 5 years ago their were single chips avaliable but finding them....

yoda · 9 Oct 2008 at 12:22

I've found a solution...
I've looked at the PIC servo controlers in more detail and found one that can have ether 4 digital outputs and 4 servos or 8 servos... and the best thing is using the program it accepts commands from an rs232 connection...

This means that instead of having one IO line per servo (4 in total) i can just have one IO line to drive an RS232 UART... and this also saves on space, reduces cost... I'm starting to like this idea...