I am making a simple robot, and am using a relatively cheap RF transmitter and receiver to send commands to my robot. Essentially, the transmitter end would send data from an AVR MCU via its UART to the RF transmitter, and a similar setup on the robot would pick up the data.
So what I am confused about is how this whole process works. I mean, suppose I have four motors on my robot which all need to be controlled individually and at the same time. How would I accomplish this? Would I encode my info in a byte (say, 1111000) where the first four bits represent the on or off position of the four motors, and the receiver would decode this and carry out the necessary task? Or is there another, better way of doing this?
This leads to my next question related to this. Suppose the method I just described is used, then how is the robot typically programmed to handle commands? Say, it receives the 11110000 packet, and turns on all four motors. Do I just let the robot keep the motors on until a new packet of info is received? Essentially, if I want continuous communication with my robot (one way is fine in this case), how would I do it if it takes a certain amount of time between each signal which is sent to be processed and carried out before the next one comes in? Maybe the time it takes for the signal to be sent, processed, and carried out is is small that the impact is unnoticeable?