Simulate motor encoder quadrature signals using an Arduino UNO

Question

I'm supposed to write a raspberry pi and arduino code to read the RPM of a motor with an encoder attached to it. However, I'm having weird numbers and I'm unsure about the specs on the motor and the encoder. So I thought it would be smart to use a second arduino to simulate the motor with encoder.

The simulator would need to produce a 2 signals representing the two signals from the encoder. I want to be able to set the frequency and phase shift of these signals in software to imitate changes in speed and direction of the motor rotation. Forward would have one signal 90 degrees ahead, and then reverse having that same signal to be 90 degrees behind. So phase difference of plus or minus 90 degrees.

I'd like to eventually have the simulator be able to simulate motor actions like oscillating between forward and reverse 5 seconds each, or forward for 5 seconds and then stop completely.

I found this code by bigjosh which is more or less what I want to do. However, that code doesn't allow for a shift of -90 deg by default. I know there's a comment there to change it, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to understand what's going on exactly. I'd like someone to help me with that.

Answer 1

Wow, that turned out to be way harder than I expected. It is very hard to do cleanly on the AVR timer. But I was able to come up with this working function, which I think is what you are looking for...

// freq_hz is frequency in hertz from 122 to 4,000,000
// shift_deg is phase shift between output A and output B in degrees (values outside -180 to +180 are normalized)

// Note that at frequencies above 44KHz you will loose precision on phase shift. At 4Mhz, everything is rounded to just 0 or +/-90 degrees.
// Note that all timing happens in 1/16Mhz increments, so frequencies that do not land on integer multipules of that will be aproximiate. 
// Use startWaveforms() directly for more precise control. 

void startQuadrature( unsigned long freq_hz , int shift_deg  );

It can glitch at start-up, shutdown, and changes in speed and direction... but so can a motor encoder so I guess that is ok. It would be possible to create a glitch-free version but more work.

Github repo here... https://github.com/bigjosh/Quadrature

So, to simulate a motor going forward with 50KHz pulse rate, you would use something like...

startQuadrature( 50000 , +90);

...and the same pulse rate going backwards would be...

startQuadrature( 50000 , -90);

Do note that if you connect an Arduino UNO output pin to a Raspberry Pi input pin that it will likely damage the Pi. This is because the UNO outputs 5 volts for a "1" signal, but the Pi can only tolerate a maximum 3.3V on any pin. You can google "5V 3.3V level shifting" for solutions to this problem.