Help Needed , UNO32 with self Programed GUI ?

Created Sat, 03 Sep 2011 15:47:22 +0000 by submission

submission

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 15:47:22 +0000

Hello everyone , :D Im really new to all this micro contoler stuff so bare with me here .

Im working on putting a motor drive on my Telescope , so far Im looking at using Bipolar steppers with the " Big Easy Drivers " and posibly the UNO32 to control them . ( was also looking at the Arduino and Teensy++ )

Im looking to controll the telescope using my own self programed GUI ( RealStudio r2010 ) to control the slew rates , etc .

Where Im getting lost is , How do I talk to the UNO32 through the USB from my software and tell it how to controll the Stepper Motor driver boards ?? Is there a .dll file or somthing I need or a .h file that shows all the commands the UNO32 will understand , should I use or can I use the windows " HID.dll " ???

Maby whats confusing me is Im looking at this like controlling a CCD camera , in my software I have gained full controll of my CCD camera with the use of Send/ReadMessage() with the use of the AVICAP.dll . with this .dll I can comunicate with the camera and tell it what I want it to do .

Everytime I do a search for this all I keep getting is links for comunicating to the microcontroller with sombody elses IDE or GUI , I want to controll the UNO32 with my own GUI .

Anyhelp you can offer would be greatly appreciated as Im relly getting confused here how this is supposed to work .

Thanks all , Kyle

EmbeddedMan

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 16:12:05 +0000

Kyle,

As the designer of the Big Easy Driver, I know that your system will work. The trick, as usual, is in the software.

To talk to the ChipKIT, you need to open up the COM port that the ChipKIT creates when you plug in. If you use some serial print commands in your code, then you will be able to see the output of those print commands in a terminal emulator (if you open up the COM port that the ChipKIT creates). Then, you can write your GUI to open that same COM port up and then you you send/receive bytes across that COM port and the ChipKIT will be able to talk to the PC.

There are some good examples of doing serial I/O that come with the MPIDE install. You can use them as a starting point.

Make sense?

*Brian

submission

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 17:34:20 +0000

Thanks Brian

Yes its starting to make sense .

If I understand this correctly then its like the commands are already in the chip itself , kinda how you described the EBB works . ( Awsum Board by the way :D )

Going to have a look at the MPIDE .

Thanks Kyle

EmbeddedMan

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:25:44 +0000

Kyle,

Yes, sort of. :-) There is no build-in command parser on the PIC32 side, so you'll need to write that part yourself, to accept bytes over the serial (USB) port and parse them and figure out what to do with them, and then send back results to the PC.

There is already some simple stepper code that comes as a standard library for MPIDE, so you can use that as a starting point for the stepper driving part.

*Brian