“Lynxmotion A4WD3 Mecanum Rover”, anyone?

Lynxmotion Rovers, Sumo, and Tracked
1

Hi,

Recently, I bought an A4WD3 meccanum rover - has anyone assembled this kit?

Looking at the online-doc and the parts delivered more closely it noticed several things:

  1. There is no code for remote control available. In the kit there is no rc controller but I plan to use the RadioLink T8S.
  2. In the doc there is an illustration that a Raspberry Pi can be installed in the A4WD3’s body, instead of the provided BotBarduino - any code how to make this work?
  3. While the motors provided have encoders installed, the provided BotBoarduino seems not be capable to handle four inputs. Any idea how to handle this issue - I imagine on a meccanum wheel rover, the encoder feedback from the wheels is important for a precise steering…

thx for any thoughts on these issues!

2

Mr. @cbenson may be able to give you some guidelines.

5

Hi rasc1234

Thanks for purchasing our Lynxmotion A4WD3 platform.

I’ll try to help with your questions:

  1. We do have a sample code for RC control available. Take a look at the “Setup” page of the guide. It’s a basic code that use the RC controller in PPM output and gives full mixed control without encoder reading.

  2. We’ve made the mounting plate compatible with the Raspberry Pi mounting holes but no code have been developed. You may find a lot of examples online that can be used. The first thing to consider is connecting the two motor controllers to the Pi and since the Pi do not have many I/O pins and is running on 3.3v for most of them you might want to go Serial. (Sabertooth support: Analog, R/C, simplified serial, packetized serial)

  3. It greatly depends on your application, needs and capability in coding. We decided to include the BotBoarduino in our kits as it’s a simple Arduino controller and has quite a few I/Os break down and can run the A4WD3 configurations.

We haven’t tested this but there are libraries out there (like THIS one) that can help with the Encoders.

All the best,

1 Like
6

Thank you for the fast reply - I will check out these clues

2 Likes