Running a picomotor

[RRAMIR]

Hello All,

My lab has recently acquired a PICOMOTOR with the necessary hardware to run it (INTELLIGENT PICOMOTOR DRIVER MODEL 8753).  I am trying to interface it with my PC through serial port but am having no luck. 

I have down loaded the drivers and the DLL library but since I am a begining labview user I really don't understand what to do to get this motor working. 
Drivers at (http://www.newfocus.com/index.cfm?navid=97)

I basically want to be able to run the motor and modify speed parameters and parameters of that nature. 

Thanks for your time


Rafael Ramirez

[MXI Master]

Rafael, from looking at the driver you linked to and it appears to have an example program to go along with the driver. Are you able to run the- application.vi" or "8751-C Homing Example.vi"? If not, what kind of errors do you get?

I will admit this is one of the most complex drivers I have seen, but the first order of business is establishing basic communication with the device. The application.vi should be a good starting place. Post back and tell me exactly what you see and I will be happy to keep helping.

[RRAMIR]

Hello Marshall,

Thanks for the reply, The applications VI works just fine.  But as you noted the code looks really complicated, I want to come up with something easier that I can understand.  I am a beginning LabVIEW user but have gone through several tutorials and am continuing to go through more tutorials to try to understand what is going on. 

The major objective of my project is to come up with something to drive this picomotor, which in turn drives a translation stage, and simultaneously collect data with a power meter. 

I have received help with the power meter code ( http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=140&thread.id=29893 ) and came up with something but it no longer works.  So I am working on the picomotor and power meter code hoping that once I come up with something for each, I can simply paste the two of them into a new VI. 

I know this a lot to ask but any insight and help will be greatly appreciated. 

Thanks for your time

Rafael

[RRAMIR]

Hello Marshall,

I have come to find that using the instrument I/O assistant  VI  is fairly straight forward.  I was thinking of just query and parsing the commands that I want but I am not sure which commands to use.  Do you think I should continue down this route or just try to decifer the drivers?

Thanks for your time

-Rafael Ramirez

[MXI Master]

Rafael,

As you noted, the Instrument I/O Assistant is very easy to use, but it still requires you to know what commands your device is expecting. These commands can usually be found in the user manual for your device, and also how to send them. This is a great path if your device is straight forward to program, the reason the driver is complicated is because it has to account for many different possible use cases.

If you want to stick with the driver, how much of the functionality that you need is available in the example code? If the changes are not drastic, my suggestion would be to start with some of the examples and work from their, even though it is complicated. Adding a few VIs is usually easier than rewriting an entire driver.

[RRAMIR]

Hello,

I have been looking at trying to figure out how to use the driver tree to get what I want but am pretty lost.  All I want the user to be able to do is to input some acceleration, a velocity, the step size (stage translation in mm).   Any suggestions or references you think I should take a look at?

Thanks for your time

Rafael

[MXI Master]

Sorry, but it looks like this example is very poorly documented, so my guess is as good as yours from what the VI names are. It looks like basing your program off the example given in  iPico Ex.vi would be a good structure to start with. Then the names of the rest of the VIs is about all the detail that the manufactures seems to give. I would suggest contacting them and seeing if you can get any more details on their driver.

[RRAMIR]

Hello All,

I have been trying to write something but could not get any thing to work properly.  I really just want to come up with something where the user could input an increment [mm] and the motor moves that specific increment untill it finishes. I have attached what I have so far, any help will be greatly appreciated. 

Thanks
 
-Rafael

[zj87726]

hi, I running into the problem like yours, have you solve?  Looking forward your reply~ Strongly need your help~!!!!!

[Mr.F]

Hi,

You are trying to control a picomotor, and are having trouble writing code based on the instrument driver? Also, I see that the last post is over a year old, both posters might have moved on to other projects and not be available to comment. If you would like more people to look at your problem, you would get more traffic if you created a new post.  Can you clarify what sort of problems or errors you are getting?

Regards,