Hi Chris,
Hope all is well. Have you ever had an application for MWorks requiring controlling a stepper motor, say, for a linear stage? We want to add this for our monkey training and I am wondering if there exists already a solution in that space you have worked with. Please let me know and any other thoughts you might have on it.
Thanks,
-Mehrdad
Hi Mehrdad,
No, I haven’t worked with a stepper motor before.
If I were going to do so, I’d probably first try controlling one via an Arduino board. There are Arduino libraries (simple and advanced) for controlling stepper motors. There’s also a proposed extension to the Firmata protocol that makes use of said libraries, so I could potentially add a stepper-control channel type to MWorks’ existing Firmata interface. On the other hand, it might be simpler and/or more amenable to your needs to run custom firmware on the Arduino device and communicate with it over serial via Python actions in your MWorks experiment.
I’m sure there are other possibilities, but that’s where I’d start. I hope that helps!
Cheers,
Chris
Thanks Chris!
-Mehrdad