This part of the project is to help you understand how we are going to control the motors of the rotator and we are deviating from the 2rpm motor to a higher rpm to be able to quickly move from one location to another at a higher speed then slow down to be able to follow the path of the satellite.

In the previous post I gave links to the parts needed and for this part of the project, we will be using the H Bridge, 2 motors, and the Arduino Nano.

I have found a good video which explains the principle of driving the motors, but before watching it I thought it better to explain a bit about writing code for the Arduino. The code is known as a “Sketch” and contains all the information for the Arduino IDE to compile it and load it into the Nano so that it can run the program.

A variable is a number that can be changed by the sketch and is usually given a “label” that identifies it in the sketch, say for example we define “Int variable1 = 5”, “Int variable2 = 2” (Int tells the compiler the type of variable it is and in this case an integer) and later as the sketch is running we want to perform a mathematical calculation and change “variable1” to another value “variable1 = variable1 + variable2;” (the “;” defines the end of the line) the microcontroller will process this and “variable1” will now = 7 (5+2). Another way to increase the value of the variable is “variable1 ++1” which will increase the variable by +1 and tends to be used in loops. See here for more information about the syntax for arithmetic calculations and more information of the programming syntax can be found here. 

(For those who want more information,  when the sketch is compiled, the compiler changes the label “variable1” to a fixed memory address which contains the value of the variable so calculations result in the microcontroller changing the value of the fixed memory address.)

The next post will be on the magnetometer and how we use it to control the motors of the rotator.