I am setting up a light automation robotics experiment using the SSC-32u servo sequencer software, as this will greatly help someone like me with little programming knowledge easily establish fairly complex motion sequences. However, in addition to controlling my servos, I also need to run a relay control board off the SSC-32u, so at times i will need to call for one of the pinouts to go High or Low, rather than setting PW to control a servo. Is there a way to add a frame to a sequence in this sequencer software program that just gives a command to the SSC-32u like #16H or #16L? I realize that the whole thing could be done from scratch using the full capabilities of Flowbotics studio, but am hoping to be able to use the available sequencer utility, so as not to have to master a fuller understanding of the Flowbotics software right from the start. Any guidance would be much appreciated!
Hi,
Here are some answers to your questions & comments:
Great to hear about this. This is exactly what it is meant for! 
As you can see in the [RB-Dsp-11], there are “switches” for outputs [8, 15]. These allow to toggle the outputs as high or low, which could work for your relay. Unfortunately, the SSC-32 sequencer software does not include those by default.
Yes, it could. What may be much easier instead is to use the SSC-32 sequencer and simply add to it the feature of “digital switches” for specific channels, as is done in the RB-Dsp-11. Adding this feature from RB-Dsp-11 to the SSC-32 sequencer should not be too difficult, but not so easy as to be trivial, mostly because it requires searching through the code to understand how each part are done and what needs to be copied.
Since this is an interesting feature, it is quite possible that we will add it in the future. That being said, it may take a little while since there was no plan to update the sequencer at this time.
In the meantime, you may want to control your SSC-32U using basic programming, such as with Python or .NET languages (C#, Vb.NET), which are really simply to pickup and have free good quality IDEs to use with. You can basic find examples of controlling the SSC-32U here. Basically, any programming environment where you can access a COM port (typically any modern language/development environment supports this) and write to/read from it is all you need.
As for sequencing, you can “code” your sequences as done in this Arduino example. Here is the definition of the sequence (in three parts) and the loop that plays it.
We hope this info helps!
Sincerely,
Sébastien:
Thank you very much for taking the time to post such a thorough and helpful reply! The Flowbotics software is certainly an awesome modular approach, and I to hope to master it a bit more, although its total capabilities are likely way beyond me. The last programming class I had was probably on Cobol!
It might be easy enough for me to extract the output modules from the arm software you linked, though. I assume that, if done correctly, I could embed an output within a pattern so it executes during a frame or between frames. As you have no doubt gathered, I need the outputs to execute at specific times during the run-through of the pattern of frames.
I am trying not to have to code the whole sequence manually, from lack of experience, but also as there might be a rather high number of sequences and sequence repeats involved. I will most certainly study the examples you kindly provided, though.