Rover 0.9

(Update – May 2018) Well… Today I had Rover operating (somewhat) reliably. I’ve done a major re-write of the state machine that seems much more readable, reliable, and scalable. The bumpers were being read, the motors were behaving correctly, and the encoders were almost up to snuff. in short, it bounced off the walls, corrected it’s direction and carried on as expected. As I said the encoders are still iffy. I’m considering capping this experiment, and moving on to a four wheel Rover. It will depend on whether or not I can get a more reliable encoder on the other toy motors.

I’ve attached, below, a few pics of the current Rover.

I did have a few casualties along the way. I seem to have fried the USB port on a Arduino Nano. The processing seems to be still running but I cannot access the sketch. It may still be accessible via the programming port, but that will be a job for another day. I also lost my cute little home built H-bridge. Ive replaced it with a OCEPP motor driver.

Another casualty may be my original thought of building robots from recycled toys. The idea seems to have bumped into some reality. I’m seeing a lot of effort needed to get some very basic requirements met with toy parts. Accurate and reliable closed loop feedback is crucial to my needs for mapping and navigation.