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Oak Matthias
TWSB Prototype
This is my current self inflicted nightmare of uncertainty (more on that to follow)!
Designed as a Two Wheel Self Balancing robot, this is the prototype for the next development of Soundman.
The chassis was no problem to design, send of for waterjet cutting, and weld together.
Even installing the electronics went fairly well, until I 'realised' thorugh 'evidence' that I had managed to short the 24v of the battery, through the chassis, through a fastener, through the MPU6050 chip, through the arduino (killing it), into my laptops USB port (killing the port).
This bought my current functioning USB port down from 1 (because *cough* reasons) to none. No bother, a new arduino (nano this time, for cheapness for potential other 'issues'), and a second hand replacement motherboard and I'm back in business (thanks Lenovo for making hardware that is designed to be repairable).
The Software
Through much trial, tribulation, and MPU6050 tutorials, I have been able to make the robot self balance. This was after I managed to stop the inherent drift of the angle received from the MPU, and the timeout problem within the wrie.h causing the arduino to freeze, leaving the wheels spinning at their last received speed.
Thinking I had solved the main issues, I completely rewrote the code, to be more modular based. This meant the different areas of the robot controls could easily be swapped out to updated code, or new modules added.
It worked! See the video evidence!
However, as soon as I added the Wii Nunchuk as a controller, the robot started behaving sporadically.
Removing it didn't even return the performance to that seen in the video.
At this point the project is stalled until I can figure out what the problem is. Possibilities include I can imagine are and not restricted to:
1)My code.
2)Faulty MPU sensor (I've heard many of these chips are faulty.
3)Interferance caused by the motors/power cables.
Time and knowledge are my holdups, I plan to tackle these as soon as I can.
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