Arduino Nano with Drive Control for tracked Vehicl

Hi all,
my first posting on this board and of course it's because i have a problem :slight_smile:
While i'm not new to electronics in general this is basicaly the first time i'm doing something with a microcontroller and so far i had a lot of success and fun with simple stuff like LEDs and servos. However, connecting a drive control instead of a servo to the Nano has me stumped.
I expected the DC to basicaly behave like a servo, 0 full speed in one direction, 90 stop, 180 full speed in the other direction.
So far i have no success at all in matching the reactions of the drive control to the input i give it via the servo library, so i expect i'm overlooking something basic here. I tested the DC with a normal remote control and it works fine there. Also i tested my setup with servos instead of the DC and they do work fine as well.
Any ideas?
Cheers
Björn

a drive control

Spec?

Sketch?

Help us to help you.

Sorry, should have thought of that in the first place.
Here is everything i have regarding documentation
http://www2.produktinfo.conrad.com/datenblaetter/175000-199999/190872-an-01-ml-Dual_Fahrtregler_de_en_fr_nl.pdf

Since the controler has an auto neutral position detection i try to set the controler to 90 during setup, with a delay that allows me to connect power to the controler while the Arduino is already running.

Cheers
Björn

OK, you remembered to connect the grounds?

Can you post your sketch, and a quick description of your observations of how it behaved, and how that differs from what you expected?

There isn't much of a sketch since i directly connected the signal pins to D3 and D5 and of course connected both servo connectors to common ground with the Nano. I left out +5V since the controler does not need it and i expected only problems.
The observations are hard to describe since the behaviour is not realy repeatable. I get everything from simply full speed to intermittend start/stop, slow speed increase without changing the program a bit.
I started out with a program that fed increasing values to the two defined servos, but after i encountered the irregular behaviour i went for something absolutely simple and just fed static values (expecting simply constant speed movement), with no apparent effect. Thats why i think i might have missed something basic.

Mystery partly solved. As soon as i give the controler values lower than 70 and higher than 120 it stops working coherently.
Since i can reach topspeed within those values and i don't need much precision it will work for me, but i still wonder what is realy causing this.
Thanks for trying to help AWOL :slight_smile:

Cheers
Björn

PS: Above or below these values the controler seems to reset itself and thereby adjusting itself to a new neutral value.