They will have some autonomous mode, but I'm also interested in having a "human-controlled mode", with some sort of wireless connection, but I'm trying to do this on the CHEAP. So for instance, a $70 wifi shield is out of my range.
(a) Would that work well enough to steer a robot around? (b) One robot at a time could be ok, but what if I wanted to have 4 robots going at once...do the IR remotes conflict with each other?
Any input appreciated. I could also consider bluetooth, etc. options if they're affordable/simple enough. Thanks in advance!
Basically yes they do.
You can have different codes for each robot but you can not stop them interfering.
One way round this would be to have different modulation frequencies on each robot but you are limited to just a few. Standard chips go from 32KHz to 42KHz and I would go up in steps of 4KHz for maximum isolation.
Hi,
Yes you would expect interference between multiple IR remotes. If you used Arduinos to build the remote controls as well as the Robots, you could assign different codes for each robot and the others would ignore others. But you still have real-time interference when multiple remotes transmitted at once.