hello guy, great site.
i have a question, ive been looking around for a while for a way to control a servos speed and position and ramping direction change relative to speed via control pots and motion recorded by a pc then played back kinda like a guilderfluke sys, but with a ramping up and down rather than digital up and down, is this possible?
thanks simon

Hi Simon,

I'm not quite sure what you mean by a ramping up and down of the speed rather than digital. Could you explain further?

cheers

Matt.

by ramping i mean changing the speed of direction change gradually rather than off/on (left/right) eg: if a finger is being controlled by a servo and its rotating to close the finger, my joystick pushing forward to open the finger will make the servo instantly change direction and open the finger in quite a robotic/stiff way, if i could have a chip to slow the servo to almost a stop before speeding up to the desired change of direction based on speed of my control with a potentiometer a virtual curve is drawn the quicker my change the steeper the curve of slowdown/speedup.
its really difficult to explain.
simon

Hi Simon,

I understand what you are getting at. I use this in my Xpress control systems, it is called filtering. By varying the amount of filtering apllied to the servo output, you can change how hot the motor is, in effect damping it's movement. This gives a much more organic look to the movement. It's also usefull for large sacle animatronic models to prevent them from sudden movement that may damage the mechanism.

Matt.