Yay, finally I finished my Primo project! After some blood, sweatring and tears it’s done.
It was pretty obvious that for some reason I couldn’t get the wireless connection to work using the XBees. Luckily I had other options around.
I used some 315Mhz RF transmitter and receiver as I thought they were pretty straight forward to use. But when I hid the receiver/transceiver behind some plywood I could see that not all messages were received.
Next try was using HC-05/06 bluetooth modules. But I never managed to get the two Arduinos to connect.
So I digged even deeper into my parts box and found some nRF24L01 modules I acquired some time ago on ebay for 2$/piece. Setup was surprisingly easy and I got the connection going in almost no time.
But having the Cubetto on battery power I still had the problem that the motors didn’t turn fast enough. Even though my batteries (4x AA) said they were 2000mAh somehow they didn’t provide as much juice.
I found a rc helicopter in the basement that crashed only after one afternoon of usage by my son. I put it away thinking of some spare parts I might use. And from this helicopter I took out the batterypack. They are NiMH 7.2V 500mAh but are working very well in the cubetto.
I also made some changes to the code. I thought I could improve the code when the Cubetto is moving. Now it’s like:
while (counterL <= steps && counterR <= steps)
This means the Cubetto counts the spikes of the wheels and keeps the wheels turning until it reaches the number of steps.
But as the control board will send its directions after 1500ms (straight) and 1000ms (turns) respectively the Cubetto might miss this commands if it’s low on batteries.
So I added the functionality that the Cubetto will suspend the wheel counting activity after 1350ms or 850ms respectively so even if it ran very slow it would not miss a command being sent.
long t = millis();
while ((counterL <= steps && counterR <= steps)
|| (millis()-t)<MAX_DURATION_STRAIGHT) {
The reception by my kids was great: They loved it. Even though the four year old does not really get the full understanding of it. But she loves her robot!
I’d definitely love to receive Primo’s lesson plan:
@roman_m @fromScratchEd this is incredibly well made guys. Would love to share our first draft of the lesson plan with you!
— Primo (@primo_io) June 26, 2014
My version of the Arduino code is on GitHub.
Would you please share all information about your version of cubetto i would love to replicate it.
But i am not engineer so i need the full details for that :).
Thank you
As a kickstarter backer I had access to the source files on github. Check it out here: https://github.com/primo-io
Hi!
I´m already making the prototype and it´s almost done. We follow your tips and exchange the xbees for the NRF2401L modules. We are experiencing two issues: the arduino mega sketch uploaded smoothly but the cubetto´s are showing an error. The other question is about how you address the modules as transmitter/receiver? Cheers!
Hi Eduardo
Important is that both have the same pipe id like here
RF24 radio(4,10);
const uint64_t pipe = 0xE8E8F0F0E1LL;
And then the Mega uses write
Serial.begin(9600);radio.begin();
radio.openWritingPipe(pipe);
while the cubetto reads
radio.begin();radio.openReadingPipe(1,pipe);
radio.startListening();
Tks Roman, I’ll check it and keep you posted…
There is still a problem uploading the cubetto sketch….the error message is: “void value not ignored as it ought to be”. Any clue? Tks again!