I am new to this community and have stumbled upon a project I want to complete for my Autistic son.
I was able to program my 3D printer with the code supplied and make a few tweaks to fine tune the machine. From there I then printed the Wall-E robot designed by Chillbasket. The method of control he has is through an Arduino nano. I have the Mega 2560 as well as the adafruit PCA9685 16 channel servo controller board. I plan to use an Actobotics dual motor controller as well. Rather than using a raspberry pi with web interface I want to use a Turnigy Evolution RC drone controller. This is an 8 channel transmitter which is enough for what I need to control. The motor controller uses pwm for two channels that I want to do as skid steer. Therefore I will be using the transmitter in mode 1 so the joystick on the right would be for forward/ reverse but also become mixed as left right steering. I then need the additional channels for arms raise and lower, Head rise, look up/down, head left right, and both eyes up/ down. I have found a connection guide for connecting said components to the Mega. I have the sbus signal from the receiver to pin 19, the SDA pin 20 and SCL pin 21. Power and ground is explanatory. I am in need of the code for translating channels from the tx/rx as well as coding for the Mega to control the motor control that is a dual channel proportional speed controller. Any and all help is greatly appreciated.
What is the difficulty? What is You question?
You managed to program a 3D printer. Why not this project as well?
You can Google "Need help"....
CapMike:
Rather than using a raspberry pi with web interface I want to use a Turnigy Evolution RC drone controller. This is an 8 channel transmitter which is enough for what I need to control.
An even simpler and more flexible option might be to create your own "transmitter" using an Arduino and using a pair of nRF24L01+ transceivers for the wireless connection. An nRF24 can send up to 32 bytes in a single message - which could be used for up to 32 channels. It is also easy to implement bi-directional communication. I use nRF24s for radio control for model trains.
If interested Have a look at this Simple nRF24L01+ Tutorial.
...R
If you provide some links to the things you're talking about it would be a lot easier to help. You know what your Wall-E looks like and what motors, servos etc. it uses. I don't. You know what an "Actobotics dual motor controller" is and what control signals it needs. Presumably you know the detailed specification of the channel outputs from whatever RC receiver you're using. That's a bit too much for me to just guess at.
A quick search on "Arduino s-bus" found a useful looking library at GitHub - bolderflight/sbus: Arduino and CMake library for communicating with SBUS receivers and servos. that might get you started with reading the input data. Driving motors is usually easy once you know exactly what control signals your chosen motor driver needs.
Steve
Railroader:
What is the difficulty? What is You question?
You managed to program a 3D printer. Why not this project as well?
You can Google "Need help"....
I already had the proper sketch file for doing the printer. This project is from scratch.
Again, what is the difficulty? What is Your question?
Steve thanks for your reply. I have searched for two days looking for code. I know for the most part the channels out from the transmitter.
This instructable was less than helpful for me. https://www.instructables.com/id/RC-Control-and-Arduino-A-Complete-Works/
I then found this but again am at a loss because it seems there is code needed to be installed into the Mega in order for this to work Reading Remote Control Receiver Values with Arduino | Ryan Boland
This is the Actobotics controller and it is a simple PWM speed controller Assembled Actobotics® Dual Motor Controller - ServoCity
I know that somewhere in the sketch this needs to be added in order to tell the board what channel does what. Using the Adafruit Library | Adafruit PCA9685 16-Channel Servo Driver | Adafruit Learning System I have already downloaded that file bt again not sure where to put it into the sketch.
Here is a link to the project I have done but am trying to get away from using everything he had used.
https://wired.chillibasket.com/3d-printed-wall-e/
If you are trying to make an RC controlled Wall-E robot, why not just use the RC components and skip the arduino?
The receiver for this transmitter is s-bus-ppm only sending all signals on one line out with telemetry in. Its a new transmitter and I don't have available an extra 8 channel. Both my 8 and 10 are in use with my airplanes and drones
Both the projects you linked to are conventional PPM receivers with standard servo signals. No use at all for an S-Bus receiver. That's why I pointed you to the S-Bus library. There's another library GitHub - mikeshub/FUTABA_SBUS: SBUS driver for arduino but unfortunately the examples in both of them aren't very useful.
The problem is that with S-Bus and the PCA9685 you have chosen to use uncommon methods both of getting hold of the channel signals and also of writing to the servos. I don't think there is much chance of you finding existing code that does exactly what you need.
I don't know how you're searching but "Arduino SBus" got me a number projects that read and decoded S-Bus signals e.g.Arduino S-Bus That's worth getting working first.
When you have those the Adafruit tutorial give you some idea of how to run the servos using the PCA9685.
Steve
Steve thanks for your reply. This transmitter is able to output either PWM or PPM on either i-BUS or s.BUS it also allows me to program failsafe on all channels. My understanding of both i-bus and s.bus is they invert signal. I am going to try a connection with a different transmitter to verify the motor controller will do as my signal will request. I will then go through the process of trying to decode the signals