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PIC question

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Jazzupyourazz

New Member
Hi!

I'm planning on building a little industrial piece of machinery this summer, in which I will be needing to control multiple electric motors. As I have no knowledge at all, I was recommended to use microcontrollers for this task, which i have googled.

I need a PIC which has everything, and is very easy to use. One catch, though, it needs to be under a dollar, and so does the PIC-holder.

Can anyone help me pick the right one?
 
Why a $1 price point for the PIC, are you buying 10,000?
Are you going to contract out the design?
What's the motor(s) power requirements?
What's a "PIC holder"?
 
Well, you see, i'm going to need a lot of them. 'Bout a 120, because i've got about a 120 electric motors hanging round. So i'd really like to keep the costs down as much as possible ;). I'm not going to contract out the design, yet.

I'm sorry for the incorrect term of a 'pic holder'. Thats a little stupid, i really mean the PIC-housing. But as you know i'm kind of a noob on this subject, so I don't even know whether it is possible to just mount them to a board.
 
A PIC cannot drive a motor directly. If they're high current / AC motors the PIC is the least of your cost problems.

What is your target cost per unit?
How big are these motors?
 
would that be possible?

The motors i'm using are pretty small, straight-forward 5v electric motors.

what kind of PIC should i use to control those 120 motors?
 
You can't Jazz. You seem to have some preconceptions and so little knowledge about what you're doing that your project is dead in the water from the start. Can you logically explain for what reason you would even WANT to power 120 motors at the same time?
 
What are the part numbers of these tiny motors? Do you just want on/off, bidirectional, speed control?

What inputs does the PIC need, ie limit switches, temperature, light, time etc...
 
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Guys, i'm sorry for my noobism. I don't really have any expierence using any kind of electrotechnical stuff, and i've tried to learn it through tutorials and googling it, but the proffesional lingo is killing me, i really have no idea what everything means.

So here's the bottom line. I have designed this industrial machine, which is able to saw through wood. It's quite complicated, so thats where the electric motors come in.

I need them to control the parameters. The cutting and sawing itself is done by a big-ass motor which is controlled by me. So the little electric motors do not need lots of power, they just need to be controlled through a PIC (or one computer. But preferably a PIC). Problem is; there are many. As i stated before, about a 120.

The PIC should be able to control the speed control, on/off AND bidirectional. That's about all. The electric motors itself are 5v motors, just like these:

[URL="https://shop.conrad.nl/modelbouw/modelbouw-motoren/modelbouw-elektromotor-mini/233977.html"[/URL]

As I have NO experience whatsoever, i came to this site, hoping to clear some things up. What kind of PIC's should I use? Are there PIC's that can control 120 of these things, so that I only need one? What is the cheapest PIC suitable for the job? (I'd like to keep costs down as much as possible). And do I need more hardware (and what kind of hardware) to get the electric motor to move from the PIC?

Sorry for my lack of knowledge. It's just an entirely different world, electrotechnichs, and I can't really seem to get into it without the basic knowledge. Which i don't have.
 
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You've not provided enough information Jazz, a PIC can't directly control ANY motor, you have to build or buy motor drivers for it.

Lets start with the basics. How many motors are there actually, how much current do they require, and what is their voltage rating, also are the AC or DC motors?

Starting off with no knowledge and expecting results is not particularly practical, you need to find someone locally that can explain this stuff to you or find a book that you can learn from. allaboutcircuits.com has some good tutorials that start from the very most basics of static electricty how conductors/insulators work etc.. and works it way up.

I'm still having trouble picturing in my head a device that requires 120 motors to function, can you explain how this thing works better?
 
What parameters do you need to control? positioning the saw? I dont understand why you need 120 of these tiny motors.

Anyway. In order to control the speed/direction of any motor, you need an H-Bridge circuit controlled with pulse width modulation from the pic.
 
Jazz- I would strongly suggest hiring someone to design the control circuitry for this, and do the PIC programming. The switching/control circuit will be way over your head right now, and trying to learn to program a PIC ontop of it all is going to stop you dead for a long time. Your talking about a complex program. Most of us here that have worked with PIC or any other micro controller have spent atleast a few hours getting to the point where we can blink an LED.

What in the world does this thing do with 120 motors?? Why on earth do you need so many? Do you need independant control over all 120 of them?
 
I think you probably need 120 DRIVERS, one pic and 15 shift registers - that you could do for under $1 per stage. A small motor like that can be driven off a fifty-cent mosfet, the shift regs are like 30 cents or so and you only need 15 eight-bit shift regs for all 120 motors. Add a backspike diode, RFI cap and a gate resistor and you're still probably not going to break $0.75 per stage.
 
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