kayla05
Hello all. I am new to EZ-B. I am trying to set up a tank drive using a sabertooth 2x60 as my motor controller. I cannot figure out what configuration i need to control the motors. I have tried the serial connection in the tutorial but it will only control motor one and in only the forward direction. i have tried it in R/C mode with switch 1-off, 2-on, 3-on, 4-off, 5-on, and 6-off. using that configuration both motors start moving the second i apply power to the motor control board but i am not sending any commands to the ez-b. What other configurations can i try? i have spent the last 4 hours surfing the community and have found nothing that has worked for me. i also tried the configuration in the sabertooth manual where switch 1-off and 6-off but here as soon as i apply power motor one powers and starts moving without me giving it any commands from the EZ-B. any assistance would be very helpful. Thank you.
Welcome @kayla05
That looks like a home made tank chassis? I am eager to see more details if you don't mind.
We are an inquisitive bunch here, and love pictures and videos
Yes we are building a tank for a capstone project. Presentation is tomorrow night. lol.. We still have much more work to do on it. Still need to get the rest of the body built and painted. Also need to figure out a way to construct a circuit to control the firing of the dual turrets we made. The tread is home made using bicycle chain and aluminum shelving. The drive system uses 2 9.6v ryobi drill motors with the gears from the drill. We did realize that the motors have alot of torque so we modified the program to slow it down some. It was a costly mistake running them at full speed as we lost one of the motors. lol.
Videos will come. There is another group in the class building a tank as well but so far what we have seen there tank completed for the most part. We will be running it over.. lol.. We will try to get some video of them battleing it out during the demonstration part after we present.
That is really impressive!
I hope your presentation goes well... nothing like a little time crunch to bring out the ingenuity
At least with EZ-Robot, you can make your hardware dance rather quickly without debugging lines and lines of code... well... not too many that is
Still, it is the easiest way to get started.
Looking forward to the video!
Hi, I would like to add one addition to this thread. The photo showing switch positions for the Sabertooth for simplified serial show switch position 3 in the down position. This means you have lithium batteries. If you are using a power supply with a lead acid battery for protection against motor voltage regeneration, as the dimension engineering site suggest, put switch 3 up.