Planet Arduino

If you’ve ever tried to tune a PID system, you have probably encountered equal parts overwhelming math and black magic folk wisdom. Or maybe you just let the autotune take over. If you really want to get some good intuition for motion control algorithms, PID included, nothing beats a little hands-on experimentation.

To get you started, [Clovis] wrote in with his budget propeller-based PID demo platform (Portuguese, translated shockingly well here).

The basic setup is a potentiometer glued to a barbecue skewer with a mini-quadcopter motor and rotor on the end of it. A microcontroller reads the voltage and PWMs the propeller through a MOSFET. The goal is to have the pendulum hover stably in midair, controlled by whatever algorithms you can dream up on the controller. [Clovis]’ video demonstrates on-off and PID control of the fan. Adding a few more potentiometers (one for P, I, and D?) would make hands-on tweaking even more interactive.

In all, it’s a system that will only set you back a few bucks, but can teach you more than you’d learn in a month in college. Chances are good that you’re not going to have exactly the same brand of sardine can on hand that he did, but some improvisation is called for here.

If you don’t know why you’d like to master open-loop control algorithms, here’s one of the best advertisements that we’ve seen in a long time. But you don’t have to start out with hand-wound hundred-dollar motors, or precisely machined bits. As [Clovis] demonstrates, you can make do with a busted quadcopter and whatever you find in your kitchen.

One of the bigger problems with any CNC machine or 3D printer is the issue of missed steps when moving the toolhead. If a stepper motor misses a step, the entire layer of the print – and every layer thereafter – will be off by just a tiny bit. Miss a few more steps, and that print will eventually make its way into the garbage. [Misan] has the solution to this: closed loop control of DC motors for a 3D printer.

Most printer firmwares use an open loop control system for moving their motors around. Step a few times in one direction, and you know where the nozzle of a 3D printer will be. Missed steps confound the problem, and there’s no way for the firmware to know if the nozzle is where it should be at any one time.

[Misan]’s solution to this was a DC motor coupled to an optical encoder. Both the motor and the encoder are connected to an Arduino Pro Mini which receives step and direction commands from the printer controller. The controller takes care of telling the motor where to go, the Arduino takes care of making sure it gets there.

The entire build is heavily derived from ServoStrap, but [Misan] has a very cool demo of his hardware: during a print, he can force the X and Y axes to either side, and the Arduino in each motor will move the print head back to where it needs to be. You can check that out below.