Joshua G

Hello, my name is Joshua and I go to KIPP generations, where I’m a rising freshmen. For my starter project, I am building a Minty Boost witch is really a portable charger; for my main project; I am building an R/C tank with a PSP controller by programming it to the Arduino to tell it what to do.

My building materials are the Arduino, motor shield, treads, wheels, battery pack, gear box, screws, wires, camera, sd card holder, micro sd card, and sd card adapter.

This is my final blog post, so this is going to be a summary of my project. My project is a R/C tank that is controlled with a PSP controller, and in order to use that you need a wireless receiver that is connected to the PSP controller and the Arduino so they can communicate to tell the motors what to do. My camera is simple, really: the program tells the camera that if motion is shown on the camera, then take the picture and when that is finished, it is stored onto the micro sd card.

For my second milestone, I had changed the structure of my tank by instead of taping the gear box to the board, I super glued it to the board and used double sided tape to tape the Arduino to the the tank. I placed the battery pack on top of everything and used zip ties to tie it to everything--it looks better and is sturdier than the last model. I had also added a camera onto it with a sd card to store the pictures, and I used a breadboard for that because it had a sticky part at the bottom of the breadboard and I used that to attach it to the battery. https://learn.adafruit.com/ttl-serial-camera/

This is my first milestone and I was able to drive the tank around and was also able to control it with the PSP controller. The most challenging thing to do to make the tank was the gearbox because I would have all the gears in place and it would fall out, so my advice is to have someone else be there to hold all the gears so they won’t fall out. Then, my gearbox would not fit on the board so I had to tape it to the board and tape everything else to everything. http://www.billporter.info/2010/06/05/playstation-2-controller-arduino-library-v1-0/

This is schematic of the wiring of the wireless receiver to the Arduino; this is also the programming of the tank.

#include <PS2X_lib.h>

PS2X ps2x;
int right_motor_direction = 12;
int right_motor_speed= 3;
int left_motor_direction = 13;
int left_motor_speed = 11;

void setup() {

pinMode(right_motor_direction, OUTPUT);
pinMode(left_motor_direction, OUTPUT);

Serial.begin(9600);
ps2x.config_gamepad(7,5,10,6, false, false);

}
void loop() {

ps2x.read_gamepad(false, 0); //read controller and set large motor to spin at ‘vibrate’ speed

Serial.print(“Left: “); Serial.println(ps2x.Analog(PSS_LY));
Serial.print(“Right: “); Serial.println(ps2x.Analog(PSS_RY));

if(ps2x.Analog(PSS_RY) < 127) {
digitalWrite(right_motor_direction,HIGH);
analogWrite(right_motor_speed, map(ps2x.Analog(PSS_RY), 128, 0, 0, 255));
}
else if(ps2x.Analog(PSS_RY) > 127) {
digitalWrite(right_motor_direction,LOW);
analogWrite(right_motor_speed, map(ps2x.Analog(PSS_RY), 128, 255, 0, 255));
}
else {
analogWrite(right_motor_speed, 0);
}

if(ps2x.Analog(PSS_LY) < 127) {
digitalWrite(left_motor_direction,HIGH);
analogWrite(left_motor_speed, map(ps2x.Analog(PSS_LY), 128, 0, 0, 255));
}
else if(ps2x.Analog(PSS_LY) > 127) {
digitalWrite(left_motor_direction,LOW);
analogWrite(left_motor_speed, map(ps2x.Analog(PSS_LY), 128, 255, 0, 255));
}
else{
analogWrite(left_motor_speed, 0);
}

delay(50);
}

http://paulbleisch.com/blog/2013/01/03/simple-remote-controlled-arduino-tank/

This is my starter project witch is the Minty Boost or a portable charger. I had to solder a lot of components onto a small board so I had some issues with soldering, when I soldered the components on backwards and it took a long time to get them out and out them back in.