Can you help? Home-brew remote pan & tilt control

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Mike79
Posts: 2
Joined: 27 Nov 2018, 15:24

Can you help? Home-brew remote pan & tilt control

Post by Mike79 »

Hello,

I'm building a remotely controlled pan, tilt and zoom head to work along side qdslr dashboard. It uses 3 stepper motors and is currently controlled by an Arduino. I'm all good with the hardware, but I don't really know where to start with the networking, or even what the best general approach to it is.

I want to remote control it over wifi (not blue-tooth) using my phone. I'd prefer to just use one router for the whole setup. Can anyone offer me an over-view of the best way to go about it? I'm happy to google the details.

Here's what I imagine:
1: Set up the arduino as a server hosting a single web page, which allows control over the p/t head - that part I can do.
2: Connect the arduino to the same router that ddserver is running on via ethernet..... will that work?
3: Access the web-page via my mobile browser.... job done? Not that simple?

Is that the best approach or is there a better/simpler way?
Would it be better to use page hosted on a second server on the router rather than the arduino? Is that even possible?

In the past I have controlled devices by passing commands in serial form over bluetooth from an app-inventor app. That's super simple to do - can I do the same sort of thing passing the commands over wifi? What would the general approach to that be?

Any other suggestions/advice? Should I be going a completely different way? My programming skills are pretty basic and I know nothing about networking so please bear with my ignorance and stupid questions.

If I have to I'll just try everything until something works but if anyone can shorten the learning curve for me I'd be really grateful.

Thanks.
hubaiz
Site Admin
Posts: 2001
Joined: 27 Jan 2015, 18:58

Re: Can you help? Home-brew remote pan & tilt control

Post by hubaiz »

The setup you imagined would work. You can connect the Arduino with network to the router.
I think you could make it with one Raspberry Pi 3 as it has programable gpio and built in BLE and wireless and it is cheaper then Arduino+router.
Mike79
Posts: 2
Joined: 27 Nov 2018, 15:24

Re: Can you help? Home-brew remote pan & tilt control

Post by Mike79 »

Thanks - my thinking with the arduino is mainly that I'm familiar with it already.
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