I took apart a robot dog and got it to be controlled by the arduino (taped to its face) and an h-bridge (on the breadboard taped to the back of its head). It doesn't do anything but walk forward yet, but I hope soon to have sensors or something hooked up (and maybe a battery pack eventually so I can lose the usb tether).
Walking backwards is an impossibility without disassembling the whole dealy and rewiring everything, which is still a possibility at this stage. Reversing the polarity on the wires it had from the controller simply puts it into stop-and-bark-incessantly mode.
I will probably try to replace the transistor with a mosfet if I can find one cheap, because I fully expect it to overheat; I managed to blow one transistor already when playing with the circuit, and I can see the spectre of the blue smoke rising before me. The little guy is running on five volts and he's rated for three, but three volts won't run the motors when it's going through the arduino for some reason.
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