lmnts's Page

Hi Erick,

The current Firefly website is: http://fireflyexperiments.com/.  Unfortunately, the new service I'm using doesn't support a discussion board (at the moment).  I'm looking at implementing a 3rd party service... but haven't had the time to do it.  I would recommend posting any questions under the Firefly Group page on the Grasshopper site.  There are a decent amount of discussions running on that site and people can go and look for solutions to other problems as well.

As for your question about needing more juice... do you need more power? or more speed?  Steppers actually have more power the slower you run them... so if you're running it at full capacity then you might be trading off some torque power.  In addition, steppers are usually a little less powerful than servos (and other motors)... but you gain the ability to precisely control them for more than 180 (which is one limitation of servos).  Here's a good tutorial explaining some fundamentals of stepper motors: http://bildr.org/?s=stepper and here's a really good explanation of different types of motors and how they work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5thxBgew7N0.  You may have to skip ahead a little bit to get to the motor control stuff.

HTH,

Andy