My son and I have just finished the mBot Rover and it is awesome. So next we want to refurbish an old R2D2 toy he had that is no longer operational and replace the micro controller with an arduino. It has a total of only three motors. two for the legs and one for the head to rotate. In our imagination we can see all kinds of sensors on this platform while maintaining the original R2D2 looks and configuration. We are obviously newbies however he has taken to this like a duck to water. So any suggestions would be great. Like a board that can support the motors and sensor array you would expect R2 to have.
Thanks
R2D2
Do you have any spec on the motors? What type of batteries?
Sounds like you’ll need at
Sounds like you’ll need at least three motor controller channels. Assuming it’s not a full-sized R2D2, you could probably use an Adafruit 4-channel motor controller:
https://www.robotshop.com/en/motor-shield-kit-arduino-v23.html
I’ve used that motor controller on lots of small robots. It works great with an Arduino Uno, and would allow you to control all three of your motors via i2c commands. Adafruit has lots of really good documentation and examples for it.
Regarding sensors, that’s one good thing about the Adafruit motor controller I listed - it doesn’t use up any pins of the digital I/O pins for the motor control, leaving plenty of pins for things like SR04/05 distance sensors, and outputs like LED lights (like neopixels) and piezo speakers.
If, on the other hand, you’ve got a full-sized R2D2, you might need a controller that can handle more amps. You really need to figure out how many amps your drive motors are going to pull. If it’s over 1A/motor then you’ll probably want a different motor controller.
