Hi I am pretty new to robotics in general so excuse my ignorance (I am a noob ) or if this has been posted before somewhere. I have a lynxmotion 4 degrees of freedom arm with an SCC-32 board and using the Servo Sequencer Utility have had fun creating strings of commands for the arm. I now want to take this a step (or 2) further and add some sensors. I understand you can’t use these directly with the SCC-32 and need another board such as the Phidgets Sensor Interface 8/8/8. Ultimately I want to have the arm motion track and be able to touch or pick up a slow moving object with either IR or sonic sensors but understand some experimenting will need to be done to reach this goal.
My questions are these.
Can I use Flowbotics Studio to link the sensors to different servos?
Can Flowbotics studio do real time object tracking?
Can Flowbotics and the SCC-32/sensor interface board handle multiple sensors, possibly up to 8?
Is the SCC-32 board and Flowbotics the right choice for this kind of project or should i be looking elsewhere.
The SSC-32 board does actually have four analog/digital inputs (named A-D) that can be used for sensors. They are identified by item 10 in the SSC-32 manual.
These are good for IR sensors, sonars with analog output, potentiometers, push buttons and limit switches. They do not support interrupts, so they will not work well for Ping))) sonar sensors or shaft encoders with quadrature outputs. The digital input latching support can be used to work around this to a certain extent.
Yes, the Lynxmotion projects in FlowBotics Studio do support the inputs. Depending on which projects you are using, they are implemented differently: the SSC-32 Servo Sequencer project reads all four as analog inputs, but the AL5 Arm project reads all four as digital which is better for limit/contact switches. You can copy the analog modules from the SSC-32 project to the AL5 project if you like.
FlowBotics can indeed be used to do real-time object tracking and you can use on of the Lynxmotion projects as your starting point. Inside the projects, you can implement your custom robot logic in the User Programming module: in the AL5 Arm project, there’s already a sample that shows how to use the B & C digital inputs as triggers for playing a sequence of patterns. You can modify this logic and build your own patterns to do object tracking instead.
You can also use a Phidgets 8/8/8 module for inputs instead of (or in addition to) the SSC-32: simply grab the module from the Toolbox, and then start connecting the module outputs to your tracking logic.
) or if this has been posted before somewhere. I have a lynxmotion 4 degrees of freedom arm with an SCC-32 board and using the Servo Sequencer Utility have had fun creating strings of commands for the arm. I now want to take this a step (or 2) further and add some sensors. I understand you can’t use these directly with the SCC-32 and need another board such as the Phidgets Sensor Interface 8/8/8. Ultimately I want to have the arm motion track and be able to touch or pick up a slow moving object with either IR or sonic sensors but understand some experimenting will need to be done to reach this goal.