Hi everyone, hope you can help out a newcomer with what might be “silly” questions.
I am working with a new 17 DOF humanoid robot and am looking for a good controller. I have heard wonderful things about the SSC but know very little about it.
The robot uses 7.4VDC servos and is powered by a LiPO battery. The servos are not HiTec or Futaba (which is what the SSC says is supports). I assume that the SSC will happily control these but thought I would ask in advance.
Also, there are numerous accessories I would like to be able to use as well such as Gyros, Accelerometers, GPS, IR, etc. Will the SSC support these types of devices? I to realise this is hard to answer without more detailed information about the devices.
I have seen the SEQ software and it looks great. Overall is the SSC a strong platfor for development of similar custom apps? I would like to be able to build my own version of the SEQ software (not copy of course, just make a similiar interface that’s more specific to my robot).
Any input, opinions, personal experiences, or direction you can offer is greatly appreciated.
As the project advances I’ll have more details readily available to share.
Thanks again for dealing with the noob/vague nature of the questions.
These are classed as sensors and the SSC-32 doesn’t normally have anything to do with these. Usually these are handled directly by a microcontroller. The SSC-32 does have four analog ports, but I don’t think the resolution is as good as you would get using analog ports on a microcontroller, which are usually at least 10 bit.
The SSC-32 can also do discrete digital I/O when servos are not attached to any of the servo ports, but I’m not sure if this would be useful for reading digital sensors.
Personally, I would rather use the microcontroller ports for handling sensors and leave the SSC-32 to what it does best - controlling servos.
The SSC-32 is a servos controller and does that really well.
If you need to use sensors such as the one you described, you need a dedicated micro-controller.
Here is a possible configuration:
Atom Bot Board (ABB) with an Atom 28-Pro (the board accepts a lot of other 24/28 pins micro-controllers, Basic Stamp, OOPIC-R,etc…). Use this to handle all your sensors and send commands to an SSC-32 controller, via serial I/O.
The board has 20 I/O pins, Inputs for Sony playstation controller, and a lot other features.
The Atom 28-Pro has an Hitachi H8 core (can be programmed using C or Basic Atom) and execute about 100,000 instructions per second. It comes with an IDE to write your program and download them to the board (www.basicmicro.com)
Thanks so much for the input so far. I definitely have a better view of dealing with sensor input.
Is it safe so assume that since no one has commented on the appropriateness of the SSC in general for servo control that it is a good choice and can handle the other “requirements” that I have laid out?
I think the SSC-32 will handle any servo control job you might want to throw at it. It can do group and speed controlled moves together or separate also. It’s working great with my continuous rotation servos too and I have my robot actually able to go in a pretty straight line for the first time now.
It’s working great with my continuous rotation servos too and I have my robot actually able to go in a pretty straight line for the first time now.