In-Depth photos and videos of this entire project are available on my photobucket library.
Here's how it looked with temporary IR mounting:
After spending several frustrating hours trying to make the Adafruit/SainSmart Motor Shield (V1) play nice together, it's just not going to happen. I even rewrote several sketches to see if I could isolate any issues and make it work. Both libraries utilize timer 2 and I didn't manage to find any solid way to redefine which timer either used.
Details of the timing problems: the timing issues completely lock down motor terminal 1 & 2 on the shield, while 3 & 4 remained active, but glitchy. For example, the rear motor on terminal 3 worked fine, but forward motor and its steering motor didn't work at all because they were on terminals 1 & 2. Even after moving the forward motor and its steering motor to terminal 3 & 4, the code ran glitchy.
Even when defining both a separate command for steering left steerMotor.run(FORWARD); or right steerMotor.run(BACKWARD); the timing issues made steering locked in the forward position when trying to use both frontMotor.run(FORWARD); and steerMotor.run(FORWARD); together. When steerMotor.run(FORWARD); or steerMotor.run(BACKWARD); were used independently, they would function as intended.
Though this brought a lot of head scratching, I did figure out a good position for the Arduino's power switch, which, when using a Sparkfun Barrel Jack Power Switch fits perfectly on the side of the chassis enclosure.
http://i1277.photobucket.com/albums/y485/BeepBoopBuzz/IMG_5853_zps117d8858.jpg
Also, realistically, IR has a worse than terrible range, so I'm not really down any features.
For those interested in the IR codes I obtained from the SainSmart remote, and what my plans were with them, here they are:
- Power = -484956645
- Play/Pause = 1386468383
Number Keys for steering:
- 1 = Steer Left Only = -1760117185
- 2 = Forward = 1033561079
- 3 = Steer Right Only = 1635910171
- 4 = Steer Left & Move Forward = -1943902853
- 5 = Stop = 1217346747
- 6 = Steer Right & Move Forward = 71952287
- 7 =
- 8 = Reverse = 465573243
- 9 =