I am thinking about making a simple arduino robot. I woul use 3 sharp IR range finders for obstacle detection (one in front and two on sides) and two DC motors controlled with H bridge for movement. I don't know how to control the turning. Would wheels aranged like this work?
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So three wheels. Idea is good but I don't know if the third wheel would make too much drag.
Another thing is remote control - i want to control this manualy sometimes. I looked at the RC car remote and reciever and I would use
that if I could. The cars reciever has four pins - two for one motor and it just changes the polarity. I would like an idea how to connect that to the arduino so I can get 4-way motion.
And there is the problem of power supply. I was thinking about using 9V NiMH accumulator (250 mah) but I don't know how long it would last. So any idea?
About the wheel - I want something that I can build at home. But I just remembered that I culd use the RC car's motors and wheels so that would make things easier. The car needs 7 AA batteries - about 10V.
If I use my own homemade wheels I would use this motors:
Another problem with those Sharp IR distance sensors. Three of them cost a little too much. So is there a better and cheaper way of getting the distance from the obstacle?
The most important thing here is what to do about RC control? So because the RC remote controler for the toy car just reverses the polarity of the motor pins, I don't know how to wire this to arduino to get the correct response. Because once the one pin is ground and other the voltage and another time this is reversed.
So here the author uses a panasonic IR diode/sensor. Could I use some other 3-pin photodiode?
EDIT: I tryed it with TSOP1838 from vishay. And it worked - sort of. So I get 0 when it detects something but the problem is that it is not constant 0. So I get 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1... But when nothing is detected I get constant 1. Another strange thing is that with this atmega gets realy hot. So hot thay you cant hold your finger on it.