Bluetooth Rover 5 control. AVR ATtiny84

Here is a fun project I've been working on for some time. Here's mainly how it's set up.

A C# program on my Lenovo x100e takes input from a Logitech Rumblepad 2 (I'm calling this the 'joystick' in the video). The data from the two joysticks then gets converted to 4 bytes:

0: Forward speed for motor 1
1: Backward speed for motor 1
2: Forward speed for motor 2
3: Backward speed for motor 2

This data gets polled, converted and sent at 100Hz.

These 4 bytes are sent to a BlueSMiRF bluetooth serial module. From here it gets sent to my favorite little chip, the AVR ATtiny84. This is a $3 12 I/O chip with PWM, ADC, interrupts on every pin, 2 timers, internal 8MHz oscillator, and more features. It does a lot of the smaller operations that people will use a whole Arduino for. Instead, for $3, I can keep this in a circuit and not feel like I lost out on a $30 Arduino. An ATMega328 will run you $4 on digikey which isn't much more, but these are smaller and have just all the capabilities that you usually need.

Anyways - the ATtiny84 receives the 4 bytes and sends the interpreted command to a motor driver (TB6612FNG). From here the motors turn accordingly.

Cool. More info to be posted at my blog - check it out: http://electronic-excursions.blogspot.com

Thanks for checking it out!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• bluetooth
• attiny
• attiny84
• avr
• logitech
• rumblepad
• c#
• bluesmirf
• arduino
• rover
• sparkfun