DMX stepper motor control

[pixelninja]

Hi,

First-time poster so if I make any faux pas please let me know. I'm trying to make something similar to this - https://www.instagram.com/collectifscale/ Basically, a spinner for an LED light bar. Ideally, the control data would be wireless. The LED control data will be wired and sent from a separate app so that part is basically sorted. The hang-up at this point is the streaming motion control.

I'm using an ESP32 and stepper driver to control a NEMA 17 motor which spins an LED strip inside of a diffusion tube. So far, I can send individual rotation 'targets' to Accelstepper over wifi and it moves gracefully (with acceleration) but what I need is to be able to stream positional data via either Art-net or OSC. When I try to stream positional data the rotation slows considerably and becomes very jerky. This leads me to believe that the ESP32 cannot process the network data, as well as the stepper library, fast enough though I don't know if that is indeed the bottleneck hence, this post.

I'm not asking anyone to 'do my homework' for me. I'm just hoping to be pointed in the right direction by someone with more knowledge and experience in this area than myself. In the broad sense, is it possible to stream DMX or OSC data to an ESP32 so it can control a stepper in near real-time? If so, should I ditch the wireless aspect and move to an ethernet solution?

Thanks in advance.

Dan

[ESP_Sprite]

The ESP32 should have no problems keeping up with a stepper motor, especially when you use dedicated peripherals like MCPWM or RMT for that. What does your code look like? Are you perhaps trying to bitbang the stepper signals?