First off - I have had a GREAT experience with this board. I absolutely love it.
I use a Mac, so I wrote my own little application in Processing to send commands over to the board, and it’s working like a charm, over XBee and everything
I just want to make sure I am understanding something - I apologize in advance if this is a really dumb question.
I wrote a rudimentary creep gait for my robot by hard-coding in sequences of movements, and then sending out the commands over serial using a timer. It works, but due to an error in my program’s timer, I discovered that in some cases, commands are being sent while the board’s is still moving. I noticed because the stop command, which positions the bot in a neutral position was not responding immediately.
Am I correct to understand that if I send the board a bunch of commands at once - for instance:
#0 P500 T1000\n #0 P2500 T3000\n #0 P1500 T2000\n
These commands will all run, one after another? If I am interpreting what I am seeing correctly, this is the case.
If so, how can I abort all scheduled moves, and send a new position.
For instance, in the above example, what if 500ms after I send those three commands, I send another one:
#0 P750 T1000\n
Hopefully my question is clear - if not please let me know. Thanks for this product, it is amazing!
If all three of those commands are sent to the SSC-32U without any pauses in-between them, then only the last one will likely have time to be executed at all. Simply put, whenever the SSC-32U receives a command for a specific channel, it will set that as its new goal. This cancels any other move command for that channel. You can read more about the command set in the SSC-32U manual on pages 24-26.
As mentioned above, the simple act of send a new move command for a channel will cancel the previous move command on that channel.
As a side note, if you send position 0 to a servomotor, it will put the control signal to “LOW” (or 0 V DC), which will make it unpowered and able to move freely (with no resistance).
That clears things up for me. Looks like my problem is somewhere in my program
I think what I need to do is have the control system poll the board to see if it is finished moving before sending any other commands, so I can be sure that the bot is ready.
