How do I control the motors in a third party usb toy with LabVIEW?

[Cuchulain]

Any suggestions?

[josborne]

What toy?

[ajmartin]

Sorry, I missed the USB part of the question.  .....

Since you said "motors"  you probably will want a dual Hbridge driving the motors and that way you can control the direction of the motors independently and also simply adding an inverter IC to this  you could implement Locked Anti Phase PWM! Well depending on your DAQ, you might need an external microcontroller for the PWM. Still it sounds like a fun project. That is of course you actually meant SERVOS, in that case, never mind.

Alan

[Cuchulain]

It is a dream cheeky usb missile launcher.

http://dreamcheeky.com/product/missile-launcher.php

[ajmartin]

NERF makes some WAY more cool stuff you can automate. Just my opinion.  With out hacking into this thing it would probably be very expensive to interface to LV.

Am I wrong? Was this an Advertisement?

Alan

[josborne]

Without any sort of known interface, I think you'd have to do some difficult reverse engineering to make it work with LabVIEW.

[wond3rboy]

Hi, if you are only wanting to control motors than you have a lot of options. Use the parallel port with a current driver, use the serial port and a micro to control the motor. If you want to interface the USB device than this is where to get started.

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/42B604435E3F9604862565E20043CD30

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/4478

[ajmartin]

You are still going to need to  understand the third party device communication protocol.

Alan