Joystick control of ESP301 is not working

[Binoptics]

I'm porting my LabView code for controlling orthoganal stages with a joystick from an ESP300 to an ESP301 controller and have had very limited success.  The problem seems to be around the way the two different controllers handle commands.  The ESP300 could handle a stream of commands, some of which were identical.  The ESP301 seems to halt if it recieves two identical commands (where is this behavior documented?).  Having recoded my joystick handler with this in mind, the stages still are halting after a short period of time. 

I'd like to know if there is an example joystick controller available AND if there are other gotchas like the one described above which may be impacting my application.

[Greg-H]

Hi,

How are you sending the commands to the ESP301?  Also, are you constantly polling the joystick to see what position it is in and then sending a command?  Could you post the section of your code that sends the commands to the ESP301?  It could be that you are overflowing some sort of buffer on the device which is causing it to stop moving.

Regards,

Greg H.

[Binoptics]

I am sending the commands via USB.

I have fixed the discrete movement problem, but now I have another problem:

The ESP301 axes will freeze and the front panel will contain the error:

"Axis 2 positive software limit detected"

The thing that is odd about this problem is that our stages only have a 6 inch travel, which is only 152.4 mm and when I configured my motors with the ESP301, my software limits were -5,000 and +5,000 in mm.

Is there any way to get my current configuration settings from the controller to verify that my configuration is correct?

Could somebody send me an example ESP301 configuration file to work to work with these stepper motors:http://www.omega.com/pptst/omht_series.html (the OMHT23-597 motors) and has a 200 mm software limit and will be able to handle extremely small incremental moves (+ or - 1 micron if possible)?

Any other help or information would be very much appreciated.

[Greg-H]

Hi,

How are you specifying the distance in software?  Typical software limits are based on the encoder counts since the distance would be based on the hardware you attach to the motors. Can you try increasing the software limit and see if you still get this error, (be careful not to drive the motor to far)?

Regards,

Greg H.