After yesterday's check off (having the CVC xbee talk to the ACV xbee), we decided to take it one step further, having the CVC actually send motor commands over to the ACV. For our drive train functions, since we plan on having one "orb" to control everything with an accelerometer, luck would have it that our motor mapping functions from 218b fit very nicely with this control system (http://218b.weebly.com/software.html). For this prototype we used one potentiometer to act as the forward and backwards command (a la y-axis of accelerometer) and another potentiometer as the turning (x-axis of accelerometer). It was a bit tricky to control the boat, but the hamster ball should work a lot better!
Please see the videos below to see our boat on its RC maiden voyage (unfortunately we did not have champagne). This was a quick and dirty prototype (lots of duct tape), but we definitely got a feel for how easy the boat is to control, and it also showed us that some tweaking needs to be done in the motor mapping.
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