Ard-e: The robot with an Arduino as a brain

Step 3 Testing and making the remote controlled version of Ard-e

So before we start driving Ard-e we need to make the Arduino mobile. All that you need for the Decimilla to become mobile is a 9 volt battery connected to a plug that fits into the external power supply. I ended up cutting the power cord from an old transformer and got a nine volt batter clip by taking apart an old nine volt. The jumper also needs to be moved from the usb power to the ext power. If the battery is hooked up correctly the power light on the Arduino should light up. If not you probably got the polarity wrong and should switch the wires. I did this at first and it didn't cause any damage to the chip but I would not recommend doing it for long.

Now you should test to see if everything is working as you expected. Attach something to the pan and tilt system like a camera or led. I used a laser zip-tied to the servo because it fit nicely and I had one laying around. Drive Ard-e around and try to not shine the laser into your eyes.

When I first put Ard-e together I put the Arduino behind the controller and taped it in place. With this set up every time I ran either the driving motors or the panning motor the servo would go to the 0 degree position. Apparently the running of the motors would interfere with the timing control pulse and make the servo think that it was supposed to be at 0 degrees. I figured this probably was because of how long the control wire on Ard-e's servo was. It had to the run from Ard-e to the Ardunio behind the controller all the while being in close proximity to the wires carrying the current to the motors. These wires induced alot of noise into the control wire and made it go to 0.

To fix this problem I moved the Arduino from behind the controller to on Ard-e. Note the very professional looking duct tape mounting of both the servo and the Arduino. This eliminated the motor wires inducing noise and fixed the problem. The long wires then just carried the power to and input signal from the potentiometer instead of the power and control signal for the servo. The noise from the motor wires now affects the reading of the potentiometer which has little to no effect on the degree that the servo is driven to.

So you now have the remote controlled version of Ard-e. Basically you just made a really cool home built car that you can drive around and point at stuff with. The Arduino is underused to say the least. Ard-e right now is using 1/6th of his ability to sense the analog world and 1/14th of his digital I/O capabilities. You could save yourself some money and just take out the servo and Arduino if a home built car is all you want.... But if you want to really sink your teeth into robotics read on about how to make Ard-e drive himself.