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Topic starter
2023-12-13 12:52 pm
My background is software engineering and performance of high end servers. Recently started to get an interest in Arduino programming. Especially driving a steppenmotor.
Found a nice small and affordable TFT screen, and now struggling how to combine reading from it, while driving the steppenmotor at higher speed. Steppenmotor is a NEMA 23, controlled by a DM542T driver. Arduino a Mega2560. Might need a second Arduino controlling the TFT only, since it looks like it take quite some time to determine if the screen was pressed. A nice learning curve ahead of me 🙂
2023-12-13 1:15 pm
@pvdb Are you looping on the stepper? Have you tried to use an interrupt to handle the screen? Just remember, the clock time to deal with a screen is a very loooooooong time for a stepper. I am unfamiliar with stepper motors so I don't know if you have to loop on them or fire and forget. One of those will not play nice with a slow screen. Your experience with 'high-performance' servers should help, but what you need, as you likely know, is a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS. I could have never made my ticker plant work at all, let alone hold the record for the world's fastest transaction processor without pre-emptive MT.
First computer 1959. Retired from my own computer company 2004.
Hardware - Expert in 1401, and 360, fairly knowledge in PC plus numerous MPU's and MCU's
Major Languages - Machine language, 360 Macro Assembler, Intel Assembler, PL/I and PL1, Pascal, Basic, C plus numerous job control and scripting languages.
My personal scorecard is now 1 PC hardware fix (circa 1982), 1 open source fix (at age 82), and 2 zero day bugs in a major OS.
2023-12-13 2:11 pm
Found a nice small and affordable TFT screen, and now struggling how to combine reading from it, while driving the steppenmotor at higher speed. Steppenmotor is a NEMA 23, controlled by a DM542T driver. Arduino a Mega2560. Might need a second Arduino controlling the TFT only, since it looks like it take quite some time to determine if the screen was pressed. A nice learning curve ahead of me
Welcome to the forum @pvdb.
A couple of things...
- You'll want to open a new thread in the proper section of the forum. This is just for welcoming. Try to find one that is more related to your problem. That way you'll get more exposure and more help.
- You'll need to supply more information about your problem, what you've tried, your source code.
- Your actual symptoms. If you've done software (as you indicate) you should know what kind of things we need to debug your problem. You've given us very little go on so far.
I have a little experience with the problems you're encountering.
- Here... driving two steppers while also hosting a web server on an ESP8266 with control commands coming in and telemetry going out of the ESP8266. Although at the bottom end of micro-controllers, it's still a far faster and powerful MPU compared to an Arduino Mega.
3 lines of code = InqPortal = Complete IoT, App, Web Server w/ GUI Admin Client, WiFi Manager, Drag & Drop File Manager, OTA, Performance Metrics, Web Socket Comms, Easy App API, All running on ESP8266...
Even usable on ESP-01S - Quickest Start Guide
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Topic starter
2023-12-14 1:01 pm
@inq thanks for the answer. I tried to tell what keeps me busy, it was not a request for help.
@zander good to know there are other OS-es for the Arduino. That is something worth exploring. However for my current thing I try to learn more with the old fashioned hands-dirty approach. Just need more feel this. Right now considering to only use the TFT to write text to, and using hardware pushbuttons and potmeters to control the movement of the stepper.
I am using the Accelstepper library, and just found out there is another one of interest: fastaccelstepper. More stuff to dive into 🙂