OpenServo.com

[walter23]

Bear with me - I'm an electronics novice; I hope you don't mind stooping to my level to give me some advice here. I can handle soldering and I'm not (too) stupid to follow your suggestions... but I'm pretty ignorant of embedded systems and microcontrollers and stuff. I'm hoping you can point me in the direction of some learning resources & advise on whether or not OpenServo (and/or OpenStepper) are tools that might be useful to me.

I'm looking for the solution to what seems, superficially, to be a very simple mechanical / robotic application. Maybe the open servo project can help? I found this via the offshoot, OpenStepper, while trying to learn about stepper motors and controllers.

I would like to build a device to position something (approximately a 1.5 pound load) at arbitrary positions along a small 2D stage (think something like a 2D CNC setup, but portable, and oriented vertically), and then activate that thing with a relay. The mechanical layout isn't yet determined but I'm probably going to devise some rails and drive the platform with lead screws or a worm drive. There are some complications which I won't go into but they aren't really relevant to the robotics problem.

From a logic level, I think it's possible to use a laptop to run a stepper motor control board with a USB interface (you can buy these prefabricated from a few sources), but I'd rather have it all totally embedded and autonomous (and laptop free; compact!). The task is very simple: three or four programmed routines of the format "Move to position X,Y. Wait for a small time interval. Activate. Increment X and/or Y, repeat." X,Y and the increment values are all constants so there's no need for complicated input (it can just be programmed into the controller). I would ideally like to have four button switches - one to initiate each routine (ie, different starting values of X,Y and number of X and Y increments), and perhaps an extra one to act as an abort / reset switch.

Am I barking up the wrong tree? What would you recommend I learn? I hate to sound lazy, but if there are inexpensive prefabricated components that I can assemble and program without getting too deep into the underlying electronics that would be ideal, however I am open to learning whatever is necessary