As a summer project, I set out to use an STM32 microcontroller (particularly the STM32l476rg Nucleo Board) to control a turret, which is driven by 2 stepper motors for gun aiming and 1 servo motor for a trigger-pulling mechanism. I did this with the purpose of familiarizing myself with the STM32 family of microcontrollers and of having a cool project to apply my knowledge of them. The turret is controlled remotely by a PS3 controller which interfaces with an ESP32 board. In addition to remotely controlling the turret's steppers and servos, there was an independent part of the project, in which I streamed video from a small camera (fixed to the gun-mounting arm), to a STM32 MPU, which I booted with a custom Linux distribution; however, this component of the project is not the concern of this repo.
The focus of this repo is the C-programming and configuring of the STM32l476rg necessary to run the STM32 MCU component of the project. This repo contains the code and configuration files that I used to set up and program the board in STM32CubeIDE. Most of the configuration work consisted of configuring 3 timers to generate PWM signals at the correct frequencies for the motor drivers and for the servo motor, which also operated at PWM. I also had to configure a UART port to receive data from the ESP32 board that was receiving data via Bluetooth from the PS3 controller. In terms of programming, I had to receive data over UART from the ESP32 board, parse the data for commands (horizontal/vertical rotation & trigger pulling), and then update the frequency sent from the PWM pins according to the driver and motor specifications.
Inside of homemade project box containing microcontrollers, stepper motor drivers, and battery adapters.
