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After a few days of struggling with stepper motor controls, I finally got everything working reliably last night. There were a lot of learnings along the way, most of them not very well explained on most tutorials I found online. My problem was essentially that I have a ridiculously powerful set of steppers. I kept referring to them as NEMA-14, but while reading this guide from Adafruit, I learned that NEMA nomenclature doesn’t mean much other than enclosure size. ...

I got the stepper motor working tonight. This was significantly harder than I expected. I had several motor driver boards lying around, and thought I would make my job easier and use an Arduino Motor Shield. As it turns out, running steppers with it is not that straightforward. I tried several libraries, everything from the standard Stepper library to the AccelStepper, which is supposed to be state of the art. There are a few things that threw me off, in no particular order: ...

I have been researching various ways to build a radar for robotic projects. I already have a Garmin LIDAR Lite I had bought years ago, so LIDAR seems to be the best way to go. However, my research shows that there are several additional parts that are also required: A slip ring, to keep the rotating LIDAR module in connection with the rest of the robot Some kind of pulley mechanism to rotate the unit A stepper motor or a brushed motor for rotation In the case of a brushed motor, an encoder would be needed to calculate exact position Wide metal bearing of some sort A timing belt or similar for pulley I found several projects that show some level of success with this method: ...

ZoomBox is ready! I designed and printed the top part and fitted the arcade buttons in. I wanted the button icons to be extruded out, which presented a problem. If I extruded them, I couldn’t print the top part upside down. Eventually I decided to print without them and then printed them separately in black filament. Then used a white acrylic pencil to contour the icons. I am pretty happy with the result. ...

Despite my initial aversion to it, Autodesk Fusion 360 is truly an amazing tool. The combination of sketching on faces and timeline editing makes it incredibly powerful. Following the great Layer by Layer tutorials form Adafruit I designed a simple case for the ZoomBox. I was able to import the official DXF files from Arduino right into Fusion 360 and map the screw holes exactly. Surprisingly, there was no good information available on component heights. I had to manually measure them. For reference, the USB-A port is 12mm by 11mm and the power jack is 9mm by 11mm. They are respectively 9mm and 4mm inset from the edges of the board. These two drawings were also good references but they didn’t provide all the information I needed: ...