Hello to all,
I’m starting my build of an 8 legged walker with 3 servos per leg. What I would like to know is what would be the better servo controller to use? The ARC-32 or the SSC-32? I also would like to use PS2 controller, what else do I need to get started.
I am new to this. But I have done a lot of reading and searching. I have so many questions but I thought I would start with the main one first. I know that I need to walk before I can run.
Kevin
Hi and welcome Kevin,
This is a hard one to answer. The two are completely different beasts.
That is the SSC-32 is great for taking care of all of the servos. That is you pass it strings through its serial port that are commands, that tell each of the servos where to go and it takes care of making sure all of them get the proper pulses 50 times a second. In addition to this it also does timed group moves. That is if you tell lets say all 24 of your servos a new location you wish for them to be at in lets say 500ms, it will do the work such that all of them arrive at the right location at the right time even though some servos have to move farther than others. It also allows you to use the program SEQ to create sequences for the servos and can run those sequences. BUT: it needs some external processor to tell it what to do. This could be your PC or could be some micro controller such as the Basic Atom Pro (BAP), or Basic Stamp, or Arduino, … There are lots of programs that are currently developed on different platforms that use the SSC-32 in this way.
The Arc32 on the other hand is sort-of a cross between the SSC-32 and the BAP. That is it is a micro controller, that supports the same language and IDE as the other Basic Micro micro controllers such as the Basic Atom Pro 28 which is used in most of the programs that is up on this site. It uses the same Renesas H8 microprocessor as the Bap40, which runs at 20mhz instead of the 16mhz that the BAP28 runs at. Also they added some hardware servo support to the ARC32, to make it handle up to 32 servos without using a lot of processing power.
With this you can do a complete project just using the Arc32. As a test case I converted the standard Phoenix code (3dof Hex) from running on a BAP28 with an SSC-32 to just running on an Arc32. This is described in the thread: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6042
So again it guess the answer is, it depends…
Kurt
I agree with what Kurt said. The bottom line is the ARC-32 is new, therefore it does not have a lot of code examples floating around yet. If you are an experienced programmer wanting a nice platform to write code that can get as complex as you need, the ARC-32 is for you. If you don’t know an “if then” from a “do while”, you may want to use the SSC-32 / Atom Pro combo with our pre-written code examples for your bot.
Thanks guy’s,
I have zero experience in programming. But I do have some idea how it works. And having some examples will help. I would like the program to change on the fly. Meaning to change movement with out finishing a move. I also would like the faster running controller it will be moving all 24 servos at once.
