Hank Fletcher

Ah! So you're saying it would be redundant to have a code for moving both wheels in the same direction. Instead, the cpu program should interpret a keyboard command for "forward" or "backwards" and quickly send alternating left-right code to the robot. Essentially a 50%, alternating PWM signal message sent through the parallel port and over the transmitter would be required for "straight" motion. 100Hz would probably be fast enough, but if part of the system hangs (most suspect would be my Windows 2000 OS), there could be unexpected, chaotic results. I love it!

Torben

Actually I was mostly just trying to see what Mike is saying about the limit on the number of discrete values per side. I know Mike's pretty darn smart so I wanted to get what he was getting at and for some reason it didn't sink in for me until this post of yours.

Mike, I know what you're saying now. Makes perfect sense.

Hank, to be honest almost all of my bot programming has been in pseudo-simulators (like droidbattles) so I quite liked your value map, since it would fit nicely with the droidbattles assembly language. Although the possibility of doing the PWM control you outlined would be fun (especially if control were lost as you mentioned.)

I've got some work to attend to then I'll think about this some more.


Torben

3v0

Keep in mind that my original suggestion was to get a better RC rig. All I am suggesting is that one could use the original simple RC setup as a channel to send data between two processors. On the reciever end you can use a PIC to decode the data stream. After that standard h-bridge PWM etc for as many items as you need to control.

I have no idea regarding how fast data could be transmitted.

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Hank Fletcher

There seems to be only one way to find out, and that's to do it! I'm going to have a crack at it, first a simple non-stream method. If that works well and consistently, I might try bumping up my options to - dare I dream - a two-bit packet!