Controllers information

Guyome

Good morning. First of all sorry for my english I'm French, and I only knowledge computer / electrical but not electronic.

I like to know if it is possible with the Propeller Controllers vary the tension of a small engine (Vibrant)? If so, in the program or an electronic component?


Also, is it possible to read / write to external storage (USB Key, SD card) and play sounds with a small speaker rather than a buzzer?

Many question at a time

thank's.

Mike Green

Any of the Propeller boards with an SD card socket can read and write PC-compatible files on the card (Activity Board and Propeller Board of Education). Any of the Propeller boards with a mini-phone jack can produce all sorts of sounds including playing .WAV files from an SD-card and speaking synthesized speech from phonemes (Demo Board, Activity Board, and Propeller Board of Education). The software for these can be found in the Propeller Object Exchange. Some of the speech synthesis software has been posted here in this forum a few years ago.

An SD card socket can be added to other Propeller boards ... any board with 4 available I/O pins. Stereo sound can be added to other Propeller boards ... any board with 2 available I/O pins. This requires a resistor and capacitor for each channel that forms a low-pass filter. You can also add an amplifier. You'd use the schematic for one of the boards that has this feature as a model for adding it to another board.

In terms of controlling a small engine, that depends on the engine and the means of controlling its speed. Can you say more about the type of engine and how it is controlled manually?

Guyome

Hello, thank you for your reply. For the type of engine, I'll use as a motor for joystick (Playstation, Xbox..).
The electrical current that will be supplied to the motor depend on the conditions of the program (the program is controlled with a joystick).


In fact, I want to build a joystick. The games (with backups) are stored in an external memory (SD or Key).
I would also like to have the sound coming out of the joystick.

Duane Degn

You'll need some way of providing the current to the motor. Often a h-bridge is used. If the motor doesn't need to be reversed then you may get by with some sort of high power transistor to control the motor.

There's a lot of information about controlling motors with microcontrollers on the internet (and these forums).

I have a collection of links to threads on various topics. In post #3 of this collection (I call it my index even though it's not alphabetical), I have some links to various Propeller tutorials. In post #5 I have a section call "Sound with the Propeller" which has links to different ways of producing or playing back sound with the Propeller. Hopefully there's some information there to help.

If you're joystick uses potentiometers, you will likely want some sort of analog to digital converter to read the joystick's position. If you want to use a game controller, there are objects for many of the older controllers available (including the PlayStation 2 which has built in motors).

StefanL38

Hi Guyome,

it's still NOT clear to me what kind of motor you are using and what you want to control.
Why the heck does a joystick need a motor? Shall this motor give a tactile feedback to the user?

What kind of motor do you mean? brushed? brushless? 3-phase-AC? steppermotor?
How much voltage and current does the motor need?

Controlling a motor strongly depends on things like that. There is a big difference to electrical light-switches (that just switch on/off)

The help here will becomde much better if you write us what is the FINAL purpose of the motor

best regards
Stefan