Stamp Programming

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

I am working on fixing the Declination drive problem.

For those who have not followed, the problem is that I designed the system 
to drive one motor at a time.  There is a motor that clamps the Declination 
axis, and one that moves it.  When I turn off a motor it has much less 
holding torque that it has with the current on.  So when I make a 
Declination move and turn the drive motor off, it tends to move before the 
clamp motor can hold it in place.

The solution is to keep the current on the Declination drive motor until 
the clamp is on.  The problem is that I use code in the stamp to make the 
coil sequence to make a move.  My scheme was to send the sequence to all 
the motors, and only turn the current on in the one I want to move.  Thus 
if I turn two motors on, then both will move.  This was a variable space 
saving measure in the stamp.  I have written code that lets me move one 
motor at a time while multiple motors have their current on.

Unfortunately, this takes one more byte of variable space than I 
have.  There are 32 bytes available, I need 33.  Sigh!  Back to the drawing 
board to figure a way around this.

Unfortunately, Henny Penny has found that no one else seems to want to work 
on the stamp code.  There are really only three possible volunteers at the 
moment.  Those that have hardware.

I figure that I will be able to get this to work.  But it will be a 
kludge.  I really hope that one of the system holders will eventually take 
on the job of writing good stamp code.

Tom Droege