Mechanical Assembly

Everything is designed to assemble as easily as possible. All the aluminium parts bolt together, and the motors and slip rings also just bolt on. The holes were designed with a slight clearance fit, so the bearings should fit easily.

Electrical Assembly

PCBs to be manufactured as provided in linked files.
Arduino, Hall effect sensors and motor controller all operate off 5V from USB powering the Arduino

An additional 12V is supplied to the motor controller which it switches to control the stepper motors.

The 6 wire slip ring only transfers the Firewire data and power.

The 12 wire slip ring transfers the FireWire data and power as well as power and data for the pitch motor controller and hall effect sensor

Software

All software is available on the github that is linked

Arduino

• The Arduino communicates with a PC based GUI. It sends position information from the hall effect sensors to the PC, and it accepts speed or position data from the PC.
• The Arduino uses SSI to communicate with the two hall effect sensors.
• The Arduino sends a clock signal each time it wants the motor to move a step, and a separate line is used to indicate if the step must be CW or CCW

GUI

• The GUI was designed in Python
• It uses a package to deal with the serial communication which I could only get to work with Python 2.7
• It gives you the a reading from the sensors, as well as an estimated position of the motor from a step count
• It allows you to set either a position or speed at which the turret must go to.
• All data is logged to a CSV file for analysis