Asked — Edited

Good Runthrough Of Adding Sabertooth And Syren

Looking for shadowing session with a Ez User on walkthrough through connecting a styrene and a sabertooth controller to be managed by Ez-b and then controlled like a tank using a wireless controller (PS2)

I see some older topics on people tackling this but I don't see a clear walkthrough of creating from start to finish this a project that would create a tank per say with a rotating turrent or dome... think R2D2:)

I do have arduino experience and basic understanding of C++

Help!


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#1  

i hooked up the dome (syren ) to D0 and i use send serial commands to do various things with dome depending on what I want to trigger them... and I am working on hooking up tank drive using the sabertooth controller examples given in forum. Powering both from same grounded power distribution block.

#2  

Do you want to do this in a script or do you want to use the sabertooth control that is built into ARC?

Serial commands in a script are straight forward... you need to set the dip switches for 38400 baud (simple serial). You only need two wires to the ezb... ground pin on the ezb (D0) to ground on the sabertooth... signal pin (D0) to S1 on the sabertooth.....


sendSerial(D0,38400,127) #forward channel 1
sendSerial(D0,38400,255) #forward channel 2

sendSerial(D0,38400,1) #reverse channel 1
sendSerial(D0,38400,128) #reverse channel 2

sendSerial(D0,38400,64) #stop channel 1
sendSerial(D0,38400,192) #stop channel 2

sendSerial(D0,38400,0) #stop both channels

You can simply do what you want by adding the sabertooth motor control and the joystick control to you project (instead of using scripts)...

#3  

My battle is not seeing the code as its being written behind the scenes... I don't understand how the interation is done and setup for the controls to the sensors and devices work other than choosing the pins etc. the logic is where I am stuck and how to interact.

Yes that is exactly what I wanted from both of you... I currently use a customized PADAWAN code (arduino in C++) from DanF in the Astromech group... which I tried adding some additional pieces (failed miserably due to wait states understanding) such as:

Autonomous movements: Go on Patrol - which allowed R2 to scan from 3 separate ultrasonic sensors (located in the skirt of his body) and return best results up to 10' ahead... and make decisions on turning left or right depending upon which sensor returned the most distance.

Follow Me - which used the PIR sensors to detect body heat and follow it... keeping distance of 2' behind and speed matching

Voice Activation - which allowed me to initialize all the above as well as ask questions and get reactions...

The ultimate goal was to take him to Children Hospitals and have a full fledged conversation and interaction in front of the kids... without having to use the PS2 controller.

Does anyone have a quick tutorial of just:

  1. Connecting the sabertooth (for the feet) and then the siren (for the dome left and right)

  2. IMPORTANT ONE - Connecting 3 different sensors and getting distance tracking (collision detection) readings from them at the same time to make decisions?

  3. Just walk through of plain and simple integration of each control to communicate and how to enable further commands through scripting.

#4  

My advice (which is what I did... coming from arduino as well by the way) is to download ARC and start playing with it... Play with it and play with it... There are lots of examples built in to show you how things work... Anything specific you can always ask here...

I could tell you how to do this... I could also tell you (maybe LOL) how to build a car... but we both know how long that would take... Do some experimenting and we'll be here if you have any questions....