Has anyone repurposed the Arduino board, Motor controller, and the motors for any other project. I am thinking about building a controller for a telescope. Anyone know if this would be possible and have any other information they might have on this topic.
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It should absolutely be possible and we will start selling the parts individually soon so you could get just what you need.
The code is generally pretty re-usable so it wouldn’t be too hard to change it’s purpose, but you would need to modify the code pretty significantly.
Thanks for the information. Is there some place I can reference all the PIN outs for the motor controllers and such?
I will work on putting together some more clear documentation for that. It’s relatively straight forward in the code (motorUnit.cpp wraps up all the motor and encoder and controller into one package), but I will work on getting more clear documentation for it.
Any chance you have some simple code I could put in the Arduino IDE to make the Z-axis motor turn continuously at a set rate? I have been trying to reverse engineer some of the code to find pin outs and such but haven’t had any luck getting it to turn yet. Trying to get something built to photograph the upcoming eclipse.
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The stepper motor code is buried pretty deep in FluidNC which does all sorts of fancy acceleration planning and whatnot which is great, but hard to repurpose.
Tell me more about what you are hoping to do?
I just need a basic program to turn the motor at a certain speed. I will have to play with the speed based on the tracker setup that I am using
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I think he is trying to repurpose the old maslow hardware, not the maslow 4
so what’s needed is a minimum arduino sketch that will read the encoders and
drive the DC motors (not doing all the gcode and position calculations that the
existing firmware does), then he can build off of that
David Lang
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Yes, exactly, just need something simple to turn the motor. I will add a potentiometer to control speed and LCD display to show the speed it is turning after I get the base code to make the motor turn using the Maslow motor control.
will be putting the Maslow back together though after all this to build some parts for a new tracker probably. ha ha. just a new hobby i am getting into so until I can get some more parts I am just temporarily repurposing.
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Is this for a Maslow4 or an original Maslow (or a MakerMade M2)?
A picture of the controller might be the easiest way to tell
Gotcha, unfortunately that controller is made by a different company and they don’t release their code open source so there’s not much to build on. You could contact them directly to see if they can help, but they’re not the best.
Ahh, ok, what controller are you guys using nowadays? I could get the IC and just bread board something real quick to make it work for now.
The original maslow used DC motors and encoders, so anything that can drive a
H-bridge can run those motors (2A current draw @12v, better to get beefier
drivers)
I don’t remember if makermade used the same motors or if they used stepper
motors.
I do know that instead of the arduino Mega, they went with the arduino Due,
which is 3.3v instead of 5v and doesn’t have eeprom storage
David Lang
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