Turning a robotic satellite finder into a cell tower finder

Let's Make Robots Beginners
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Hi, I have an automatic direct TV satellite finder designed to go on an rv and automatically find a satellite so you can watch TV. Issue is I use the internet for entertainment. It’s an X Y axis robotic platform. (rotate around, and up and down)

I’ve removed the dish, and will fabricate my own plate to mount a unidirectional 5g antenna. My goal is to use an active frequency scanner to find the closest tower when I’m camping. I’ll have to use a controller of some kind to manually move the platen until I find a signal then fine tune it so I have internet and entertainment in the outdoors.

There is a controller board that uses 2 Trinamic TMC249A-SA controllers, the problem is I know nothing about stepper motor controllers. Am I better off buying a cheap ebay controller?

Another issue is, there are no limit sensors anywhere. And because it will only allow 2 rotations before it locks up, and is limited up and down, I looked up the datasheet and the Trinamic controllers can sense when the steppers reach their limit by current draw (?) Can I use the Trinamic controller board somehow and make it a manual control?

Hopefully there’s a Pic uploaded.

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Hello @Tundrawolf and welcome to the RobotShop forum,

Unfortunately, I’m not very familiar with Trinamic controllers but the good thing is they have a lot of documentation on their website:

And according to the datasheet the stallGuard feature provides a sensorless measurement of the load on the motor. The sensorless stall detection typically is used, to detect the reference point without the usage of a switch or photo interrupter. Therefore the actuator is driven to a mechanical stop, e.g. one end point in a spindle type actuator. As soon as the stop is hit, the motor stalls.

However, there are also other options, for example yu could use a Pan & Tilt kit along with two servos and get a manual servo driver like this one:

Or get a Wireless RC / PWM Servo Controller to control it remotely.

I hope this information can hep you

Good luck with your project!