I'm more of a pipe smoker myself, but the Navy did take me south of the boarder once where I tried a Cohiba. Man, were they rough stuff.
Oh, and the mobile proto rig looks pretty awesome too! I'd never heard of a FEZ Panda, but googled it after reading your blog post. Maybe I've been out of the loop, but that thing sounds purdy dang awesome. Why doesn't it get as much press as the Arduino?
A 9v isn't what you need. If you did use one you'd need to use a BIG 9v, like a lantern battery. I think you'd need a voltage regulator, not a resisitor.
Is your shield the one in that picture? I bought an Adafruit Motor Shield a couple months ago and it was a different PCB than the one pictured.
On mine, GND is clearly marked on the right and +M (Positive for the motors) is on the left. I've read on older board it's not so clearly marked so I can't help you there.
If that doesn't work, you might try adjusting the speed of the motors instead of how long the motors run for.
Up in the void loop you initiate the speed of both motors. Interestingly, the left motor is set at speed 250 out of 255 and the right motor is set at 255 out of 255. So if I'm reading this correctly, your right motor is moving faster than the left motor. Not sure if that's intentional because of the chassis, or it your robot is running in circles.
Code:
int leftspeed = 250; //255 is maximum speed int rightspeed = 255;
So what you could do to alter the speed is change leftspeed = [value] and rightspeed = [value] in the switch/case statements.
Code:
switch(val) // Perform an action depending on the command { case 'f'://Move Forward leftspeed = 255; rightspeed = 255; forward (leftspeed,rightspeed); break; case 'b'://Move Backwards leftspeed = 255; rightspeed = 255; reverse (leftspeed,rightspeed); break; case 'l'://Turn Left leftspeed = 150; //play with these 150 values until your robot only turns 30 degrees during it's turn left and turn right commands rightspeed = 150; //play with these 150 values until your robot only turns 30 degrees during it's turn left and turn right commands left (leftspeed,rightspeed); break; case 'r'://Turn Right leftspeed = 150; //play with these 150 values until your robot only turns 30 degrees during it's turn left and turn right commands rightspeed = 150; //play with these 150 values until your robot only turns 30 degrees during it's turn left and turn right commands right (leftspeed,rightspeed); break; default: stop(); break; case 's'://stop halt (leftspeed,rightspeed); break; }
What's the difference between a power supply and a universal power supply? That Toshiba looks a lot like the backup power supplies (we called them UPS) for the gear I used to use when I was in the military. Almost had a flash back of the bad old days
Whenever I'm concerned about heat from a shield, I just add an extra stack header to the layers. Not sure how effective it is, but it makes me feel better about it.
I did measure the current at 0.99A at stall. On the Adafruit Motor Shield's "Use it" page is says piggybacking the ICs will double current to 1.2A so I went with that because it's over 1A and then I'd also still have the kick-back protection. If it starts to shut itself down again I'll heat sink it. I didn't realize the IC was shutting itself down, I just thought it wasn't giving enough current to the motors to move them which confused me because it was moving them 10 seconds ago before it quit on me.
As for the copper question on the board, here's a quick picture I snapped. It looks like they made most of the top of the PCB a giant heat sink and ran as many traces as they could on the bottom layer. This must be a different version of the shield than the one that's on the Motor Shield's page in their shop.
SOLVED Another set of 293s showed up today and I piggybacked them onto the two already on the Motor Shield.
Runs like a champ now! Must have been a problem with Amps... just weird that it would start off working and then quit like that. I just closed off the living room and let it run for 5-ish minutes with no problems.
Thanks again for all the help getting this running and teaching me about motors, Vs and Amps. Now I just need to play around with and learn to do obstacle avoidance. Back to the books! Super happy right now! !
Well, I'm running my robot with the old 293 H bridges and 5 1.2v NiMH batteries and it works great... for about 20 seconds. It's really weird, so I made a short video showing what it does.
What would cause that? If I turn it off, then turn it back on it'll run fine for another 20-ish seconds and then do it again. Really weird. Is that the H-Bridge being underpowered?
I thought about using a variable as a timer and base his phrase on how long he barks without a half a second break. The more barking the madder the response. The shorter the bark the more playful response. I ran into problems though. This is just kind of version 1.0, I guess. Definitely more room for improvements in the future.
Thank you Lefty, I've wondered that for a year now, but never thought to ask. I always used a 9v battery because my Arduino came with a little 9v battery holder, so I figured it was what everyone was using. It does make way more sense to use rechargeables though.
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I'd never heard of a FEZ Panda, but googled it after reading your blog post. Maybe I've been out of the loop, but that thing sounds purdy dang awesome. Why doesn't it get as much press as the Arduino?
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