Not sure where to post this as I have seen "antenna tracker" in a few different places.
I would like to reuse a piece of equipment that has steppers to move the pan and tilt axis. I have had no luck in finding antenna tracker electronics that would drive steppers. Or if I did I missed its meaning.
I can hack the equipment to use servos but the current setup with steppers is something I rather not hack up as it is a pretty nice piece of equipment.
My quest is: Is there antenna tracker hardware that drives steppers instead of servos?
Thanks for any suggestions.
Replies
Nothing can drive a steeper motor, but you are correct - BGC cannot drive stepper motors. It can however drive BLDC motors in micro-stepping mode, and BLCD motors are "dirt" cheap. I did not offer a solution to George's problem of driving stepper motors. Such a solution is TRIVIAL but because low cost steppers have a step angle of 1.8deg some mechanical gearing is likely to be needed and this makes the tracker complex. I offered a cheap and fast solution to the problem of having a tracker that will work with light loads, such as a single small antenna. Refer to the first sentence in my reply "here is an idea".
I have set this up and it works just fine with really cheap eBay gymbals and BGC. You need to rearrange the motor arms to get the motion required for a tracker - something like a Chinese puzzle - and setup the BGC to output Yaw on the Roll motor and input Yaw from from the Roll RC input.The main limitation I found is the IMU code - BGC cannot cope with the IMU inverting itself so deflections of even a small amount beyond 90 degrees cause chaos.
It would be interesting to use the IMU as an external IMU to the FC and let BGC be no more than a micro-stepping driver. That would work, but I am too busy with radar software to code this. It's certainly a cheap solution to a small tracker and could be a good project for someone.
Who are you???
OG said:
John Fitter said:
This is a technical forum, not Facebook. You can't make unsubstantiated claims. Tell us exactly WHY it will not work.
OG said:
John Fitter said:
Here is an idea. Get any gymbal controller. There are cheap clones on eBay. These are designed to run two stepper motors in micro-stepping mode. The micro-stepping mode gives you less torque but finer resolution and is ok if you balance your tracker.
The controllers have a serial connection as well as servo inputs designed to take pwm signals from the autopilot to drive the gymbal to a set position. It also has a motion sensor input which you can use if you want.
I use one of these with a small bluetooth dongle connected to its serial port for comms.
A BGC 3.1 Control Board is under $10 and will handle 10A peaks and -8 motors.