I did a conversion last night on the test setup. I removed the pan/tilt servo unit and the Maestro. In place of the Maestro, I put the Lynxmotion SSC32. I had to make one small adjustment to the input by switching the 4 wire connection to the Maestro in favor of a 3 wire connection to the SSC32. I then made a copy of the current sketch that I was working and started changing out the code for the Maestro. I decided that I would use the excellent SSC32 library from Martin Peris (http://blog.martinperis.com/2011/05/libssc32-arduino-ssc32.html), well actually a modification made found at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/50461514/LibSSC32Soft.zip which uses the SoftwareSerial library. One function that I like about the library is the ability to "gang" a number of servo instructions together so that they all execute at the same time. The equivalent command on the Maestro is the Set Multiple Targets command, but doesn't account for a difference in speed of execution. Same but different - don't know if I will need that in the future but I am thinking of adding a Robotic Arm which will have several servos to contend with. In either case, I need to have more than one servo going at the same time for the sweeps.
In the process of making modifications and testing out the code, the SSC32 started exhibiting the same failure to read that the Maestro did. I was a little puzzled until I started reading up on the NewSoftSerial documentation at arduiniana.org. It turns out that when you have more than one software serial connection that reads, you have to let the library know to switch objects in the code. So now I am exploring how to do precisely that.
This is a blog mostly about techie things, what I am doing to my apartment network on the cheap, IOT, 3D Printing, Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, ESP32, ESP8266, Home Automation, Personal Weather Stations, Things That Go Bump in the Night, and some side issues that need discussing. Remember, sometimes the journey to an end is as much fun as the goal achieved!
