a strange question

[Dan Brown]

Thanks for moving this post Iving,

I knew this was a silly question and its probly not even appropriate for this forum but as i'm in the early stages of getting all the stuff to build my own cnc machine i've got stepper motors on my mind, so when my friend who is organising a festival in portugal approched me about rigging up some sort of fire display the first thing that came to mind was gas torches controlled by stepper motors

i'm sure i could use mach3 to run some motors for some random affects but if i could get the steppers to move in time to the music i would be 'the man'

[FatFreddie]

i'm sure i could use mach3 to run some motors for some random affects but if i could get the steppers to move in time to the music i would be 'the man'

Hi Dan,

I'm going to start off my conversion by running the steppers from an Arduino Duemilanove board which is a small processor with lots of IO and is easy to program. It has analog inputs which you could use to sample the sound and should directly drive a stepper controller from it's digital outputs.

They're programmed in C using a PC to compile and download the program which is then self sufficient. Big advantage is cost - £25 + whatever the analog circuits cost (probably not much more than a fiver) and simplicity (it's programmed via a USB cable which can also act as a serial link for basic debugging).

You will need to be able to program in C (or C++) though or find a tame programmer but there is a good support forum for it.

I should know more in a couple of weeks - I'm expecting a 3 axis System4 setup to arrive just in time for Christmas :-)

Mark