Lawnbot finally moves!

06/03/2015
  It's been a while since I have been able to work on this project,  but it is now sitting in the middle of my living room for some major upgrades and testing!  (and my wife is still talking to me?!?)
  I had a 30amp circuit breaker attached.  The first time I tested it, It blew the circuit breaker under load.  So I installed 2 ACS711EX Current Sensor Carrier -15.5A to +15.5A.  The PWM is set to max out at 60 (out of a possible 255) and with the current sensors shutting down the current draw at 13amps per motor,  it seems to run quite well.  Higher Current supply or different motors will be a future upgrade after I get everything running correctly.
  A couple other upgrades you may notice from the video: it has a separate wireless control that will be able to take control during autonomous activities or in an emergency.  The remote is made with an analog thumbstick/joystick,  an arduino nano clone,  4x16 lcd display and an nrf24l01 2.4ghz radio (2nd one on the lawnbot).
  I also added a mosfet and relay switch to allow the lawnbot's mega2560 to turn the high voltage/current to the motor controller.  The mega does a simple voltage check to ensure there is enough of a charge. If so will turn on the motor controller's,  motor current feed.  It does this with a simple voltage divide reading on analog pin 0.
  With the upgrades of the current sensors,  relay,  nrf24 radio,  new main power switch,  circuit breaker and various leds,  it has been rewired a couple dozen times and has some new 3d printed parts.  I think the controller will outgrow the enclosure soon,  so I may have to design another mount.  I'll try to get some newer pictures in the next few days.  (already much different than what is shown in the video above!)
  The next steps are to test the failsafe controller by driving it around the lawn for a bit. The living room is only big enough to do some parallel parking tests.
  If that works out well,  then I will start building a custom mount for the propane motor and it's starter motor as well.  These will always be manually controlled for safety reasons!

Wireless controller before 3d printed housing.  Uses external 5v USB batter

A view of the control assembly from a few weeks ago.  When the wires were still manageable! 

Hobby RC remote for testing the Lawnbot!

I've been stuck indoors, unable to work on the mechanical parts of our robotic lawn mower.  I took advantage of this time and wired a Futaba FP-R127DF 7 channel Receiver to an Arduino Uno r3 and wrote a few lines of code to see if I could get it to read the signal from a Futaba T6XH-Super PCM1024 6 channel transmitter.  Was a lot easier to get the Arduino to display the signals than it is going to be for me to figure out what they all are.  This is a programmable aircraft/helicopter remote with settings for just about everything.  Ailerons, flap, Swash Plates and mixing of all the signals.  Wish it was a standard RC car remote!  It's going to take some research to program the transmitter.  With what I do know now, I believe I can get it driving the bot. 

 I started out the day knowing nothing about how to read or interpret rc hobby remotes.  I searched and found a real nice tutorial over at sparkfun.  Wasn't as complete as I thought,  but there is additional info in the comments that will help get it working with dual motor controllers.  The actual page is: https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/348

 BTW, not sure if the Raspberry Pi running Raspbian allows for enough time slicing in the multi-tasking to be able to poll the serial ports (usb)  for an rc transmitter combo.  I originally started using the Pi to program the Arduino as I always do.  When I opened the serial port monitor to view the signals, the cpu bogged down and brought the entire system to an absolute crawl at 9600bps.  Made it unusable.  Was forced to bring out another machine with an OS that I loathe! If it weren't my kids, I would install linux on it.  If you were to really delay the polling, you may be able to read it, but I would really check into other OSs or distributions if you want to use it with the Pi.  This is one of the reasons I  will be using the arduino with the Pi on this robot. 

 Tomorrow I hope to post some new updates on the chassis.  At the latest I hope to have something actually moving my the end of next week!  

 I also updated the current hardware page.  This is really starting to run together.  I think it's time to separate the parts by project.  That way if you are trying to duplicate something,  you will know exactly what I  did it with.