Hey everyone, I just found this website and have been browsing for a few days now and some of the stuff I've seen is very cool. I want to get started on my project and I really just want to jump right in. I have some experience in both programming and electronics and I want to get started on my first project. In terms of function I think i'll keep it pretty simple, but I want to create a solid base that I can easily expand upon. What I'm going for is a basic robot with four wheels. I think I'm going to use an Arduino microcontroller but I want to make it wirelessly controlled. This is where I'm having trouble grasping the concepts. I think I'm going to need two arduinos and two xbee wireless transceivers. I also so this
https://www.robotshop.com/letsmakerobots/node/4113
and I thought it would be very cool to control the robot with a wiimote. Here is my dilemma, how do I connect the transceivers, how do I connect the wiimote, and how do I program the two? Thanks for your help, so far this site is a gold mine of information.
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To control your robot from a
To control your robot from a PC with xbee transceivers you will need
BTW. For the price of these components you can also get an Arduino board and a
bluetooth modem.
You cannot control your arduino robot directly with a Wiimote, you will need a PC as gateway.
1. Arduino & Xbee & Xbee Shield >>>>>> PC & Bluetooth & USB Xbee Explorer & Xbee <<<<<<< Wiimote
alternative:
2. Arduino & Bluetooth Modem >>>>> PC & Bluetooth <<<<<< Wiimote
RF trancievers work well for
RF trancievers work well for this as well. it might give you more range than the Bluetooth, but BT is good for local area control.
I was looking to control it
I was looking to control it from a remote control made of (ideally) a wiimote but if not then several basic switches.
You are correct in your
You are correct in your thoughts about using the Wii Nunchuck that Farrusco RC used. What Guibot did was to set up 1 Arduino to read potentiometers initially, then later apparently directly read the Wii Nunchuk, not the Wiimote. Here is a good little Nunchuk-Arduino adapter to use, so you don’t have to destroy the Nunchuk getting to the wires, just plug it in. Of course, you could make one like it with a bit of PCB. There is some notes here on reading a Wii Nunchuk with an Arduino. Gareth did some experiments here with it. Once you have one Arduino reading the Wii Nunchuk well, you can then modify the program to send the data to the Arduino serial port, which is connected to the first XBee module. This XBee sends the data to the other XBee on your robot, which is attached to the Arrduino driving your robot. The program on that Arduino simply drives the robot according to the data received. Note that this set-up would have the system using 2 XBee shields, one for each Arduino. No PC needed, except to program the Arduinos.
Thank you that was extremely
Thank you that was extremely helpful, so if I understand correctly, leaving out the wii nunchuck for now, what I need to communicate betwee
controller and the robot itself is this:
http://www.robotshop.us/Arduino-Xbee-Shield-Wireless-Module-1.html
My last question is does anyone know of a good tutorial online that will help me get started programming the arduino. Again I have some background in C programming but not much and I am very rusty.
I worked through some of the
I worked through some of the examples at http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage . Seems to help me to look at and work through others code on things, might try a search on here, have a few folks building with Arduino.
I can read an understand
I can read an understand code and then take it, change it around to make it work for me, but I would really like to be able to program it from the ground up so I think I’d need a comprehensive tutorial.
