Is anyone using Nubotics Wheel Watcher and/or Wheel Commander with their rover and the Basic Atom? I am considering getting this setup for my Octabot and think I have figured out how to make it work with the Basic Atom.
8-Dale
I’ve seen those two before, and was quite tempted to buy them.
But, my motors have too large an output shaft to fit into that hole.
I’ll probably just make my own with phototransistors.
Those must be pretty large motors then.
One main reason I am considering these is I need a way to tell when either motor is stalled so I can have Octabot take appropriate action, like backing away from the obstacle and making a turn.
In my apartment, there are a lot of table legs the IRPD does not detect because they are just a bit above or below where it can see. Octabot also gets high centered and/or tips over backward when encountering things too low for the IRPD to see.
8-Dale
I have used a striped down version of the WW-02 with an AVR processor with C++. It required two input pins per encoder and as I was using a barello.net ARC 1.1 board, the WW-02 was wired with a 6 pin connector as shown in their online manual. My guess is you could wire this up with four wires per encoder (Vcc, Gnd, ChA, ChB).
My first attempt was to code it up using interrupts, but my results were pretty flakey. So I later changed the code to use polling and it worked pretty well.
I am not sure if this helps
If I get these, I’ll be trying to use the capture hardware of the PIC (Basic Atom) to count the interrupts from ChA and ChB. I can set them to count up to every 2nd, 4th, or 16th pulse on L-H transitions or every transition on L-H or H-L.
Yes, the entire setup would require 2 I/O pins total, one for each channel. The Wheel Commander can also use I2C, so that is another option.
If I get these, I want to try both communications options. 
Yes, I am leaning more towards actually getting these all the time. I would like more precision in motion control than I have right now.
8-Dale