Following on from Part 3, our motor controller has been successfully built and tested, now it’s time to release the parts used, where to place them, etc so you can build your own. I’ve actually taken consideration to what I said in Part 3 and have re-designed the Motor Controller to have the components and lines to be spaced out a bit more however I’ve changed the lines back to 0.254mm wide. You have the option of both v1.0 or v1.1 boards, I recommend v1.1 even though it is a little bigger.
So here we are, we’re going to build us a motor controller to control 2 motors in both directions. First we’ll start off with our design which shows how our components will be connected and our reasoning, we could of just bought a motor controller chip like the L298N but we will rather learn something from our build and it should be easier to use than the L298N chip. Another on the plus our motor controller will have is about 1/2 the Vce of the L298N which is an advantage when dealing with low voltage motors and low voltage power supplies as well as back EMF protection (both will be explained).
This is quite a long post and do remember that I’m also new to understanding all of these concepts so do feel free to correct me if I’m doing something wrong! I’ve spent a good month checking all this out, posting on an electronics forum and trying to grasp the concepts I’ll be explaining you.
We know how to control our 2 motors in both directions and we also know how to use our Phototransistors to detect if an object is close, now we put both of these together to form our robot. In this part we focus more on producing the code as we’ve already put our robot together as below.
So we’ve got our parts and our motor controller so we are now ready to make this robot move forward, backwards and turn. I’m assuming you’ve put the wheels on the motors, mounted them to your design, used a gearbox if necessary and you do have a motor controller. Plus you also have the 9 volt battery and clip for Arduino.
I’ve decided to make the next project that just about every person exploring electronics does… the making of a small robot. In my case, I’ll be using the Arduino to control the robot which will just be a robot that can avoid walls that I might build more functionality in the future.
The first part of the project is to acquire the necessary parts such as motors, gears, wheels, infrared sensors, etc. Luckily for me, I actually had a robot that I was building up before; it’s the Cycbot from RealRobots (for anyone who might remember it). I got around to issue 6 or 7 and eventually gave up on it. I do however have the motors, gears, wheels and the motor controller, so it’s all actually working, it just goes forward for now.
AdvanceVGA – Play your GBA on the big screen! Swap out the LCD for our board, solder some wires, connect 5V USB and VGA and you’re ready to go.
GBxCart RW allows you to backup GB/GBC/GBA ROMs, save or restore game saves and re-write supported flash carts. Mini RW option available for GB/GBC only.
Wireless Gameboy Controller – Use your Gameboy, mGB, GBC, GBA, GBA SP, GB Micro, NDS and NDS Lite as a wireless controller on Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi, etc, and on your NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube and Wii.
