Hi,
I'm trying to control a fast (80km/hr) RC car using two Arduino's talking to each other over Xbee wi-fi. No problems - I'm pretty ok with how to do that.
I also want to send telemetry back from the car to the RC via wifi then on to the pc using the USB cable. My issue is that the serial data will need to be sent from car to remote control, the remote will then need to repeat the data on the serial and send it - which means the PC AND the car will get it. I can filter out the PC data that gets sent to the car, but this seems a horrible way to do things.
Is there a way to set up a link that doesn't use serial, or to use two serial connections? I've considered softwareserial but I don't really want to be dropping instructions between the car going at full tilt and the controller!
Any thoughts? Hope the above is not too confusing.
Well if you wanted you could use xbee 2.5 and create a mesh and send id specific data that way only a specific id would get certain data and vice versa, but thats kinda over kill. What i would do is have an RF link between the RC car and remote control and have an xbee link between pc and remote control.
how ever key thing to note would be that since your car is sending telemetry data back it would also need to have a transmitter and your remote control would also need to have a receiver.
the only thing with this is that most general RF transmitters dont have a huge range nothing comparable to xbee.
the other alternative could be to bypass the remote control completely and have pc control your rc car, that is another option.
Why not just send the data directly to the PC using wi-fi?
Not 100% sure what you mean by this - are you suggesting use a second device (e.g. a wi-fi shield) to communicate with the pc instead of the USB cable?
the other alternative could be to bypass the remote control completely and have pc control your rc car, that is another option.
I thought about this, however I want to be able to use the car with or without a PC (i.e. I may not always want to lug around 3 different devices). I think the end game is to be able to send "scripts" from the PC, but use the Controller to send the instructions to the car.
Thanks for the reponses. I think what I'll do for now is just resend the data across the serial from the controller, so both the car and the PC will receive it. The car has a "dead man switch" which will stop the vehicle if no signal is received from the controller for ~3 seconds. As telemetry is sent every ~1 second recording the time of this response seems like an easy way to check for connectivity with the controller.
