I'm thinking about building as a winter project a motorized golf push cart. I know that I can just buy them but I can probably build it cheaper and it would be more fun. But I am completely new to this kind of stuff, electronics, I do have some experience in building r/c helicopters, and I am a software engineer. Here is what I would like the cart to do:
1. Go forward, back, right, left. 2. Follow, when in this mode have it follow me around keeping a distance of say 5 feet or so, basically I would have a remote on me and have it follow that. 3. Be able to be controled via remote, forward, back, left, right. 4. Be able to change mode with the remote. 5. Be able to handle hills.
How difficult would this be to do, I don't feel like it would be super difficult but I know nothing. Where should I start?
If you are new to this sort of thing and trying to build cheap, I might suggest just using a tethered remote if you are going to keep it within reach for your clubs anyway. Then it is just a matter of building an H-bridge (a big one) for each of two motors for differential steering, and a remote with a few buttons to control it.
I don’t know what kind of design you have in mind, as I’ve never seen an automated caddy, but a tripod style (like R2D2 with a golf bag for a body) should be able to roll around the fairways if you give it a wide enough stance.
Please don’t title a forum post with the vague request for help. We are a good group of people and some of the smarter ones have been about for a good long time. Some of them may not even look at a post with a basic “help” title. You would do better with something like “Looking to build follow along golf caddy”. You may not get specific answers with that title even.
To answer your question, Ben Heck built a follow along piece of luggage. Something like a Sabertooth serial motor controller, OddBot has a reasonably powered FET h-bridge floating around this site and maybe an arduino onboard along with a simple arduino remote and a couple of nrf24l01+ modules or as JerZ mentioned, wired remote. You may want to add a kill switch on the caddy that kills power to the motors. The kill switch should be separate from the remote wired or not.
You could even prototype this with very inexpensive bits of hardware and then transfer the control hardware to the larger platform. You might even be able to prototype the caddy set up on the smaller platform.
Back to my earlier response. Once you get started on this project you would do well to be specific in your forum post title.
But I would like to build on his design, a remote is not a must though the ability to follow is. I’d also need to be able to control it on the cart somehow, but I guess that would be the same as having a wired remote so maybe a remote would be a needed feature. I’ll check out the videos and start thinking of a design.
What are you’re thoughts on motors and battery sizes, I was thinking of using 2 electric scooter motors as I can get them fairly cheap with throttle controlls already.
