I’m doing a final mechanical engineering project on an automated tv mount. I am trying to figure out what would be the best choice of motor, microcontroller, motor controller, and remote controller. I am hoping to use an infrared remote to communicate angular displacements of the motor. I figure i should use a servo motor. I just don’t know how to bring them all together. Is there a kit that goes well together?
-Thank you
We have designed a model in Solidworks. We are doing a structural analysis of the model at the moment. And once we have the load that the final model will be able to withstand we are going to add motors to rotate the joints. I believe we should use DC servo motors considering they should be able to apply a torque to make the system move. The problem i am having is putting everything together. Like are there a couple of microcontroller, motor controller, and infrared remote that go well together? I want to be able to use C programming, Interactive C, or even robotC. Those are the ones i am comfortable with. Linear actuator would not work because the way the model is. For a better idea of the design the PXRU automated mount developed by Chief is similar to our design.
Thank you so much for replying to my thread. Really appreciate it.
Hi OptimusPrime,
Welcome to the RobotShop Forum. Perhaps a productionautomatic TV Lift with infrared remote will give you some ideas? You really only need a linear actuator, motor controller, microcontroller (for the infrared remote), power supply and IR remote control. The hard part will be to design the mechanics to put it all together nicely.
Hope this helps,
Thank you for the clarification. We were assuming it would be a “TV lift” as opposed to the motion being on the XY plane. Yes, you can certainly use a DC gear motor with encoder, just ensure the weight is not on the shaft of the motor. Arduino is programmable in C and CMU will be releasing a version of RobotC for Arduino. The microcontroller will handle all the communication and processing (waiting for a signal from the remote control, interpreting it, then sending the appropriate signal to the motor controller(s) while reading the encoder values and continuing to listen for any new signals from the remote.