Stepper motor emulating analog meter

Thread Starter

EB255GTX

Joined Apr 30, 2011
62
Hey all

Does anyone know of a a library or any previous work on making stepper motors, when used to move the needle in a meter, behave more like a "real" analog meter movement? i.e. a bit of over/undershoot, acceleration proportional to rate of change of signal, a bit of averaging and so on?

I am looking to do a project involving a large "analog" meter, but the cheapest and most robust way to achieve this is with a stepper driving a needle. However just moving the needle to the new position is not very satisfying compared with the movement of a real moving coil meter, so before i embark on countless experiments and code tweaks to get a nice looking movement, i wonder if anyone knows of/has previously started/wants to help with some AVR code to libraryize this?

If i could buy a moving coil meter with a face diameter of around 200mm i would, but the stepper solution means i can change the needle or make a custom one, change the behavior via firmware, get as many or few degrees of rotation as i like, etc. It's a "better" solution in so many ways apart from the look of the movement with my simple control i.e. move to the new position at a set speed.

Cheers
 
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