I wanted a navigation challenge so I decided to hack a $20 R/C car. It is going to provide some hair pulling challenges, that is for sure. It has a bluetooth dongle, a 2.4ghz transceiver, two IR object detection sensors, an ultrasonic range finder, and a three axis magnetometer. I removed the crappy steering control and installed a 9g servo. Building it was the easy part, writing the sketch to make it all work is going to take a while, I'm just going to start small and get the steering and drive motor to work, then add the IR detectors and get it to roam around not bumping into things or getting stuck in a corner.
Charley
One possible issue with hacking RC cars and similar, is that they are designed to move around much quicker than what a navigating bot normally would.
zoomkat:
One possible issue with hacking RC cars and similar, is that they are designed to move around much quicker than what a navigating bot normally would.
That is the challenge that initiated this project, I Have built numerous two motor robots that move slowly about the house, the ability to turn in place makes navigation fairly simple. The hardest would have been when I wrote a program for a Z80 controlled robot in Binary on paper, converted it to hex and keyed it in on a hex keypad. That was 20 years ago and took me weeks to write, now it would take me 15 minutes to write the same program for the arduino.
Navigation will be a challenge due to the turning radius, resulting in the need for tree point turns, etc... As well as speed control issues. Should be fun:) the largest issue I believe I will face is getting all of the sensors to work accurately.
Charley