How to make 2 two motors run at the same time

[dani0716]

Hello! I'm pretty new to pybricks but with the spike prime/ robot inventor hubs, is it possible to make multiple motors run at once instead of one at a time?

Thanks

[BertLindeman]

Sure, you can.

You can couple them in a drivebase if you want.
But separately they can be controlled as well.

Bert

[dani0716]

How would I control them separately so that multiple motors can run at once?

[BertLindeman]

Could you give us an idea what you want to achieve?
Maybe a short program what you tried?

We can now only guess what you want.

Are you using blocks or python is an important difference.

Some possibilities:
You can define more than one motor and in your program let them each do different tasks.
And you can use a set of motors as a drivebase.
Or define a car with motors.

Bert

[dani0716]

I'm trying to make a gantry robotic, an easier way to visualise it is like a 3d printer, like motors on the 3 different axis's move at the same time to improve efficiency, moving up, down and forwards one after the other is slow and will slow down the productivity rate. So I just wanna now how to control multiple motors at once.

Could I just sure (wait=FALSE)?

[BertLindeman]

I'm trying to make a gantry robotic, an easier way to visualise it is like a 3d printer, like motors on the 3 different axis's move at the same time to improve efficiency, moving up, down and forwards one after the other is slow and will slow down the productivity rate. So I just wanna now how to control multiple motors at once.

Could I just sure (wait=FALSE)?

Thank you. That makes a picture in my head.
I assume you will write that in python, because you mention the wait=False.

One syntax example from the doc:

run_angle(speed, rotation_angle, then=Stop.HOLD, wait=True)

Say you define 3 motors

• motor_x
• motor_y and
• motor_z

And some constants:

• hor_speed
• hor_angle_zero
• hor_angle_max
  etc.

Give one motor a task e.g. horizontal from the angle to the max:

motor_x.run_angle(hor_speed, hor_angle_max - motor_x.angle(), wait=False

And similar to that for the other motors.
After setting the motors, wait until all are ready and go on with the program.

Does that help?

Bert