Overview / Usage

Robotics has an indispensable application in industrial automation. In earlier ages, all the equipments were run by man power which was a tedious job. Now robots are used to control machineries. Robots have artificial hands which are controlled by desktop application. They can also be moved from one place to another by controlling wheels which are also run by desktop applications. Servo and DC motors have wide application in manufacturing robots. To control the motors microcontrollers are essential which gives command to motor to move or rotate. Therefore in this paper, our main aim is to automate servo and dc motors using desktop application for industrial automation. Desktop application can be designed in many programming languages. Here we have designed our desktop application using Python and interfaced the application with the microcontroller. As microcontroller, Arduino Uno ATMEGA328P/ Mega 2560 has been used to automate servo and dc motors. In Python, there is library entitled as “Tkinter” for user interface creation. Our application has been developed using “Tkinter”. To interface with the microcontroller, another library entitled as “Pyserial” has been used which establishes serial communication between the application and the microcontroller. Here we have set identical “Baud Rate” as 9600 baud for application and microcontroller to ensure successful serial communication. The servo motor turns the robotic hands at required angle and dc motor controls the speed of conveyer belt to move articles or cargoes in the production unit. This application reduces human efforts and the accuracy in production can be enhanced.

Methodology / Approach

The proposed technique is based on the creation of application to set the values of the angle of servo motor and DC motor. The application is desktop based and it has been designed using Python language. Next, the application has been interfaced with the microcontroller and the motors have been controlled by the microcontroller by taking the values from the application. We have created a user interface where two Sliders (Scale) have been used to control the servo and the dc motors. An application has been designed using python to control the servo and the DC motor. The first slider is used to set the angle of the servo motor. The second slider is used to control the speed of the DC motor. The first slider has the angle range from 00 to 1800. The speed of the motor can be mapped into 8 bit representation whose numeric range is from 0 to 255. The maximum speed is achieved when the speed value is set to 255. The application in Python language has been developed using the Tkinter library which is useful to design graphical user interface. For communication with the microcontroller another library has been used which is called Pyserial. This library establishes serial communication between between the software IDE and the hardware. In this library, the port number and the baud rate for the data transmission is set by which the device, that is the microcontroller, is identified.