I got a Sparkfun Redbot Kit a while back. I ended up building it vanilla and it was a good introduction to the board (the board is basically Uno and a motor shield in one) and the toys that came with it. I figured if could scavenge an RC car, I'd get a more robust redbot. I found an old RC Rock Crawler, it has a basic suspension, two motors, and a steering servo.
Unfortunately, I encountered a problem. The steering servo only has two wires. I loaded the Servo -> Sweep example that is default in the Arduino IDE to see if I could make it work regardless. I tried all the different all the different wire/header combinations on the servo headers:
- When I attach the wires to gnd and # I get a buzzing noise.
- When I attach the wires to gnd and pow the servo turns left or, if I swap the wires, it turns right.
- When I attach the wires to pow and # nothing happens.
I currently can't take advantage of the servo headers on the board (or at least I don't know how to). I was hoping that I could that there might be a work around, I just don't know what it is.
The obvious answer is that I could run both motors off of only one of the headers and use the other to control the steering (thats how the original board from the car was wired), but I can get a faster car if each motor has its own header, and I'm all about the vroom vroom...
I'm running the whole thing off the default 6v (4 AA) battery pack. I might be able to wire in the extra 2 AA's for the extra 3v but I don't want mess with the wiring on the pack unless I know it's going to work.
I have an accelerometer connected to the A4 A5 header block and the motors connected too (I checked w/o them connected but there was no difference).
Image courtesy of https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/getting-started-with-the-redbot
More info on the redbot board https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12097