I've managed to get an Arduino board to control my TCL160 turret, through the use of three buttons. Two just rotate the turret in each direction, so I can reposition it.

The main one rotates the turret in one direction for just over 1/8th of a cycle and then backs it up against the pawl, thus selecting and locking the tool.

I'm rotating 'forwards' by 1650 pulses, and 'reversing' for 300 pulses.

It seems to work OK, but on some of the positions it reverses into the pawl almost immediately, so spends quite a while stalled. On other positions it rotates back probably over ten degrees before hitting the pawl.

Does anyone know if this is a 'feature' of the Boxford TCl turret, or might there be something else going on ?

I can obviously cater for this in the number of steps it reverses, so that it is always hard against the pawl, but in some locations this is going to put quite a strain on the motors and gear train.

Tomorrow, I will remove the cover over the ratchet operate the turret, so see what it is actually doing, just in case it's something simple like ratchet stations being full of debris.

I could also tune the programming so that, based on the assumption that the turret is always at position 1 at power up, the Arduino knows how far to reverse for each position.

Adrian.