Recording servo motion for playback

Where could i find some information on creating a program in basic for recording a signal from a potienomiter, like an old joystick or even a servo, and storing that information in to a eeprom and then playing it back with a servo, for animation. Ive been googling it and cant find what im looking for, i might be searching the wrong way, if any one could provide some links or informaiton about this i would really apprciate it, Im looking for something i can run 5 or 6 servos on, each performing a different actions on.
Im basically looking for a way to make one of these : http://www.bpesolutions.com/conproduct.html

thanks
josh

Should we presume that you're at home with how to store data on external EEPROM? Presumably you'd need a chip or two of EEPROM if there is a complex series of movements to record. Gramo has a great website that describes how to interface a PIC to EEPROM chips. Here's his link:


Not to oversimplify your project, but just to break it down a bit, it seems to me that you could wire a pot to an A/D pin, a pushbutton to another input pin, and a servo to a PWM pin. Have your program adjust the PWM signal with respect to your input controlling via the pot. When you hold the pushbutton, the PIC records the PWM at any given time intervals (every 20ms seems about right). It seems to me that it'd be good to have that pushbutton recording feature, so that you could do practice runs without the button depressed until you get the motion "just right."

looking for something i can run 5 or 6 servos on, each performing a different actions on.

Click to expand...

Obviously there'd be some problems with my initial solution, since you only have so many hands to manipulate pots with! I'd consider interfacing with the PIC via your computer for the creation stage of your animations, perhaps using USB or RS-232 to be able to set each servos position and step through each frame of the animation. If each specific frame is assigned to its own pre-determined memory address, you could quite easily be able "fast forward" or "rewind" through your animation as you're creating, to adjust a particular frame if it is inconsistent with your desired effect.

That is right inline with what i was thinking, but for recording the multible servos i was thinking of making something like a talematry puppet that could use the wrist movements and finger movements to manipulate the servos. similar to what you see used for the animatronics for movies.
i was considering that or 3 buttons, previous, record, next. so i could go thought and do each servo and then have the MCU put it together and make a show

so i could go thought and do each servo and then have the MCU put it together and make a show

Click to expand...

Hmm... I don't like that idea. I think the more complex controller is the way to go. Just seems to me that there's a lot of potential to lose track/get confused over what servo is doing what when if you were to record the instructions for each servo one at a time. If you did use just one pot, however, maybe you could have a button for toggling between control of each servo within each frame? So for five servos:
- set, toggle
- set, toggle
- set, toggle
- set, toggle
- set, toggle, next frame
- set, toggle
- set, toggle
- set, toggle
- set, toggle
- set, toggle, next frame
- set, toggle
- set, etc