I brought the wheelchair base into the shop and decided to cut the plugs off and start spinning the motors. Encountering locked rotor amperage and no movement I started breaking down one the motors. It was full of rust and frozen in place. After applying a liberal application of deep creep, I pulled the other motor and gave it the same treatment. One good whack with the plastic hammer and they came apart. To the wire wheel with the rotors. Then with a sandpaper wrapped broomstick the magnets were almost pristine. Four new bearings later the motors are purring. I did inspect the gearboxes and found no water in them.
The Kangaroo x2 is in. After some driver issues I got it running on my desk. The encoders are attached and coupled to the motors. It needs improvement but it will do "for testing purposes". And the gearboxes and wheels are safely in a tote.
The original questions were indeed answered by the kangaroo x2.
The next dilemma is how to implement a two way switch to supply the packetized serial data to the kangaroo from the laptop and I have decided to use an R/C transmitter/receiver for teach mode.....so the Arduino now has to be the Lizard Brain, Pass data from computer via USB and interpret 2 channels of R/C.
I may have to move to the Mega to accomplish all of this just from a program space considerations.
Any thoughts / discussions?