Remote Control – Guilherme Martins

Driving Farrusco @ CoworkLX @ LX Factory ‘open day’

Since the first SWARS experience, I knew this could go A LOT further, but having Farrusco on a remote terrace where you could only have access by climbing an outside ladder.. I must confess, I never thought of such a thing, until… my friend Fernando Mendes (Cowork_LX) came to me with this crazy idea!

I loved the challenge, and wanted since the first moment to create a cool and easy to use physical interface and it came out a nice piece IMHO.

Then Farrusco with the wireless cam already built in for the first “Driving Farrusco” experience, I used two packs of batteries to enhance the play time (one battery pack is missing in the photo). This small wireless camera needs a lot of juice, and a little 9v batteries doesn’t feed it for to long, besides that it gives a very weak transmission with lots of interference, but with this 9.6v racing pack, it worked out really good!

And finally the video:

Some bits around the controller:

At the beginning I wanted to have four joysticks, one for each motor, one for pan and the other for tilt the camera.

It ended a bit complicated to operate and a learning curve was needed to get used to it, because this was going to manipulated by many people it needed to be simple and fast to learn.

[ FOTO MISSING showing the end result with two joysticks, a motoruino only with the necessary components and the xbee mount ]

Ratazana

This is a ratbot derivated, faster, cooler, and with more fun! :)

I like pretty much the way it is going until now, but there are still things I want to do. Beside that, I can´t make it move straight in a line, it seems that it is not well balanced.
When finished, I will post details about the building process.

G’Remote – Arduino based remote controller

27-August-2009 UPDATE:
My friend Gerhard from Germany asked me to build a walkthrough regarding the G-Remote, with part list, schematics and code. And here it is. Enjoy :D

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This is my first attempt to make a custom remote controller, and also my first customized Arduino.
After seeing this post made by OddBot I wanted to try to make one myself.

I figured out that if I purchased one remote controller it would be cheaper than buying two of these and paying shipment to Portugal.

So, ripping the guts from a game remote controller I get two joysticks, a couple of buttons, two nice motors and one small lcd.

Each joystick have one button inside, that is cool :-)

Now I have more control over my bots, specially the ones with two motors.. will post videos later.

no comments on this one :-)

Farrusco RC

I wanted to keep working with the XBee modules, and I thought it would be cool to control Farrusco.

So, first I used 2 potenciometers and assigned one to each motor.. and then I used a nunchuck controller.
Both require a learning curve and it’s only after a while that you start to feel the touch :]

This is the code I´m using to control the robot with the Nunchuck

Remote Control to Arduino

I vandalized an RC toy and connected the motor wires to Arduino digital pins.
It only gives us 1´s and 0´s which means low control, but can be handy someday :)