I,m a retired Broadcasting Consultant, with a background in electronics, but with a very limited experience of VB programming. My main interest at the moment is interfacing my PC with a small milling machine's rotary table stepper motor. There seems to be very little written material available describing the use of a VB porgramme to control stepper motors. I have devised a simple proceedure in VB6, to calculate the number of pulses to be fed to the motors, but would be interested in the calls in VB6 to feed out those pulses to the motor, using a Vellleman USB Interface Card, and to retrieve feedback info from the stepper. Can anyone help please?

Gearcutter

Happy to have you here!

Hi...Welcome to Daniweb Friend

Welcome to Daniweb

is that the Velemann PIC chip kit?

We sell those in my work (maplin electronics)

velemann have the manual for it, but the sample code is either pascal or C++, buit its a DLL so you should be able to use it in VB.

hi jbennett

Yes I have been contemplating buying the Velleman USB DMX Interface Board, which is Maplins part no: N67BH, but I want to find out if its going to do the job first, if I can..
All I need it to do is to provide a serial path out to the stepper motor board, then accept a return signal on a second line, of one pulse, to indicate the motor has received the required number of pulses.


gearcutter

Hi there,
Welcome to the group.
What you talk about sounds complicated o_o ..lol

maplin also stock a book called PIC in Practice, but i have never used it

As an alternative to the Velleman Board, I have been looking at perhaps using a USB- Serial Adaptor cable. If i open a port using this, will i be able to send a continuous string of 'bits' from the Timer in VB6? I don't need to have any feedback from the port othere than a 'stop' bit from the motor, when the required number of bits has been received, which would the ne be used to close the port


Gearcutter