Blog 5 - Motor Contoller

 The Motor Contoller 


Sabertooth 2x12

The sabertooth 2x12 motor contoller is the device we investigated for the last 2 weeks.  The device consists of both an analogue and a digital input and is used to control the motors on the swam bots, with the digital input of S1 and S2, which can be progframmed to act independent of each other. The voltage input is at 6V min to 24V max, and the courrent can go up to 12A continuous per channel.  The wiring upon the swarm bit was not we structured and so it took some time for us to discover which wire was connected to each part. 

Testing stage
After discovering which wire connected to which, we tested the motor on the bot, however the motors would only run continously foward as this was connected the the PWM output coming from the PIC microcontoller. Looking into the datasheet we discovered that there were diffrent modes corspponding to the boards operation, and we had to set the board with the desired modes, using the enable switches upon the board.



R/C Mode 
The desired mode we needed was mode 2, which was the R/C input. This input mode takes two standard R/C channels and uses those to set the speed and direction of the motor. There is an optional timeout setting. When timeout is enabled, the motor driver will shut down on loss of signal. This is for safety and to prevent the robot from running away should it encounter interference and should be used if a radio is being used to control the driver. If timeout is disabled, the motor driver will continue to drive at the commanded speed until another command is given. This makes the Sabertooth easy to interface to a Basic Stamp or other lowspeed microcontrollers.

With the desired combination switch mode choosen as follows: 

1. DOWN - RC Mode
2. UP- RC mode
3. UP - Power Supply 
4. DOWN - Independent mode 
5. UP- -Linear response 
6. DOWN -  Microcontroller mode 


We succesfully operated the motors. At start up the motor is at 1.50ms which is it's IDLE state. 

On button press of the microcontroller the following occurs: 

1. IDLE on start up 
2. Press 1 > motor 1 = 1.0ms
3. Press 2 > motor 1 = 2.0ms
4. Press 3 > motor 2 = 1.0ms
5. Press 4 > motor 2 = 2.0ms
6. Repeat 

There will be more update on this in the coming week, stay tuned!

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