Saturday, September 12, 2009

R/C Movement!

Before I had just directly wired the motors to a battery I was carrying behind the R2. Today I got the speed controllers, receiver, batteries, and transmitter all wired up. And to my shock, the whole thing worked with a minimum of tweaking. I bought the Syren 10 speed controller for the dome motor, and the Sabertooth (also from Dimension Engineering) dual channel speed controller for the motors. I had also ordered a VEX 6 channel transmitter R/C unit on Ebay, and a Multiplex receiver. The VEX unit comes with a receiver, but it seems to be proprietary and it goes only with their speed controller. I got the Multiplex receiver for super cheap, maybe $10, and I stuck the receiver crystal from the VEX receiver into it. I'm new to all of this stuff, but guys in the club had figured out, especially Jamie McShan, that the VEX crystal would work in the other brand receivers, but not the other way around. So I wired it all up, some of it rather temporarily to a short term component board, and I played around with the dip switches on the speed controllers a bit. I put the R2 up on blocks so his wheels could turn for testing. And it worked! I had a lot of apprehension, so I'm thrilled. Here's the mandatory R2-in-the-kitchen video:

1 comment:

Chris said...

Looking good dude!

Congrats.