Walking robot controlled with iPhone 4s

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi guys, firstly im new to arduino so if my questions are a little basic please forgive me. Im building a walking robot for my final year project. I have the manufacturing skills to make the robot but need assistance when i comes to controlling it.

How difficult is it to control a number of servos with an iPhone 4s?
Perhaps the iPhone would activate a predefined series of movements which would equate to the robot moving forward.

The robot is going to have four legs, each having four servo motors (16 in total). Is this too many for one board to control?

2

You will probably be using the Servo library to control the servos. I suggest you look at the library reference (you can get it via the Reference menu above) to understand how many servos it can support on each platform.

3

Hi,
I have finished the build element of my hexabot and have included an image.
II have also purchased an arduino mega and a bluetooth chip because I want to run it using my I phone. Can someone offer advice as to powering the robot, programming the legs and how it may connect to my I phone.

Please help!
Vincent

IMG_0901[1].JPG

4

Cool hexabot!

This might be a bit of a round-about solution for your project needs, but I've had success controlling my own robot wirelessly from my iPhone using MIDI over WiFi. More specifically, I ran a MIDI to serial bridge application known as "Hairless MIDI / Serial Bridge" (The Hairless MIDI<->Serial Bridge) on my computer, and used TouchOSC (TouchOSC | hexler.net) on my iPhone to send MIDI CC messages to my Arduino robot over wifi. There are many other alternate MIDI and OSC controller apps you can install on your iPhone too (Lemur, MIDI Controller Pro, etc.).

I was using an Arduino Pro Mini connected to a Sparkfun Bluetooth Mate Silver antennae, but as long as your bluetooth chip shows up as a serial port on your computer, you should be able to send converted serial messages to it using the Hairless MIDI/ serial bridge. TouchOSC has its own bridge application which I had to install on my computer to enable the MIDI signals from my iPhone to be received on my computer and transmitted to the Arduino's bluetooth antennae via Hairless. This worked for me and might be one way for you to get things moving if you're in a rush.

Goodluck!