Running steppers and servos from HAl

I spent Xmas break tinkering with HAL. The existing documentation was accurate but isn't organized in a way that helped me much. Either way, I've charged through it and gotten 3 different motor/driver setups working nicely.

They are all attached to the parallel port:
- step/dir
- half stepping unipolar drive using HAL for everything and only having optos and FETs on the breadboard
- DC servo w/ home made encoder. HAL drives the H bridge and reads the encoder A & B phases, there are only optos, FETs, and 2n2222 transistors on the breadboard

Basically, the electrical hardware I have is extraordinarily dumb ( & cheap ) and all the real work is done in HAL using run of the mill HAL components.

I'd like to contribute to ease somebody's learning curve, but I don't know where to start. If there is any interest, I'll happily share what I've learned and how I learned it, just tell me whether this should be on the wiki or the forums and which topic.

Thanks Chief Geek

IMHO:
if its short you can add it to forum.
If its longer then the wiki would be better (link to it in the forum)
The wiki is a good place for info that is 'cutting edge' , info of work in progress, or
expansion of info that is too large or specialized for the manual
If you think it is something that should be added to the manual talk to Big John .
I agree about the organizing of some of the info in the manuals.
But it is a lot of work just to make sure the info there is right and John has and continues
to work at the manual -It's a lot better then a few years ago. - I'm not about to really complain - compare it to other open source manuals!
The other problem is that the more you use it the easier it is to find stuff and pretty soon the
organizing doesn't really matter anymore. It's just when you are new!
I find the on line manual much easier, since I use it more and the PDF manual has annoyingly different lay out .
Anyways Big John is open to contributions!

Chris M

Yes, absolutely write up and share what you've learned!
John has done a great job but new interpretations of this stuff is really useful for guys like me who have to struggle through the "geekspeak".