I am very new to robotics and my first project is building a 3d printed poppy robot. I am not using the expensive dynamixel motors which has greatly reduced the cost. I am however using a lynxmotion ssc-32 board to control the servos which works well when tethered to my computer. Not so well for autonomous controls however.
My question is there any way to directly connect an android phone to use both the fancy phone features and sensors with the and to send compiled code to the ssc 32 board without having to buy another board microcontroller add more weight, wiring etc to the project. Is it a simple matter of using the serial to usb to micro usb cords or should I look into wireless/bluetooth mods to the board. Everything is on a budget but at this point if I have to buy another board I’m going to just get one with wifi and a servo controller built into one.
Thanks in advance.
Hi,
If you wish to use a cable to connect your phone to a 5 V DC TTL serial interface (like the SSC-32), you may not be able to do this with all devices. Please note that most smart phones and tablets have a “USB device” type of connection. They require a connection to a USB host since they cannot be one themselves. Following the same logic, most USB <> TTL serial adapters are also USB devices and cannot act as a host. They also need a host to function (which runs the drivers/USB stack, etc.). Therefore, connecting two USB devices together without a host will probably not work. We recommend that you perform an online search concerning your specific phone to see if anyone did this already.
The simplest solution would be to use Bluetooth to communicate with your servo controller. The simplest way to achieve this with an SSC-32 (DB9) would be to use a Bluetooth <> serial adapter (with internal antenna) that would connect directly to the SSC-32 as seen here. Please make sure the device is compatible with your phone’s internal Bluetooth module first. Another option would be to replace your servo controller for the newer SSC-32U with Bluetooth, available here.
Once you have a working wireless connection to your servo controller board, you will need an app of some kind to send commands to the SSC-32 / SCC-32U. You cannot send “compiled code” to the SSC-32 servo controller board. The SSC-32 is controller by sending it commands in ASCII strings and the details are available here: SSC-32, SSC-32U. There are many apps that are available on the Android platform that can send simple serial commands, but they usually do not include the ability to perform complex logic like what would be required for a robotic application. To use your phone’s sensors to control your humanoid robot would require you to program a new app yourself, which is in itself a complex project.
As you can see from our catalog of humanoid & biped robots, these are expensive and complex projects and are not recommended for someone starting in amateur robotics. Also, your project has increased complexity since you are not starting with a pre-made kit and you are diverging from the original project you based yourself on (Poppy Robot) by changing the motors and controller. Please make sure you are aware of the difficulties in making such a project from scratch.
Sincerely,
Sebastian,
Thank you for the information I pretty much scoured the Internet the last few days coming to pretty much the same conclusion. I did find a few hacks to add a wireless bluetooth to the ssc 32 board. It is a rather ambitious project for my first scratch built robot. My cookie cutter approach to programing is somewhat working working for me though. I just hope to be able to untethered and hopefully use the higher sensory functions for balance, sight and telepresence.
Thanks again for the help.
Cliff
Hi Cliff,
Another option for adding Bluetooth (or any other bee modules) to your SSC-32 would be the following:
- [RB-Dfr-95]
- [RB-Dro-03]
- [RB-Onl-10]
Then, you wire those parts together following this diagram.
Sincerely,
All those options are great thank you for the suggestions and info. I think I’m either going to go with an arduino uno or an ioio for connectivity with my android phone. It seems to be the most direct route to my end game which is to mount my phone for telepresence and make use of the higher functions, without spending too much time or money reinventing the wheel so to speak. I’ve seen a few projects using both the uno + ssc 32 and ioio + ssc 32 in a way I wish I had of waited a few years for the new ssc 32 to come out but alas the tether has served 2 purposes sends signal and helps to stabilize the robot during walking tests attached to the tripod.
