Lynxmotion Tech Support

Here's a picture of my PCB design. All of the inputs are in the form of 3 pin servo connections. The keypad has its own 8 pin connection.

You can plug this into an arduino or solder a mini in to make this a standalone board.

Here's the BOM, no prices just the info from my eagle libraries.

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Devon Simmons, Former Programmer for Lynxmotion.
I can try to help, but I can only offer you my best effort.

nice...
i have plenty of promini

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Eric Nantel
Qc Canada

Always liked Robot... Now i am learning to make some...! Wonderfull...

I was thinking that it would be easy to add a resistive touch screen to my board. Personally I like the keypad/nav button combo. I have a love/hate relationship with touch screens XD

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Devon Simmons, Former Programmer for Lynxmotion.
I can try to help, but I can only offer you my best effort.

I hear you... With buttons you have the advantage of tactile feeling of the buttons, with a touch screen you do not have any feedback. I sort-of shutter when I hear car companies talk about their new systems for controlling everything without any buttons. Talk about distractions... But back on subject... The plus is that when you are doing other stuff like configurations and the like, touch screens are pretty cool as you can make them specific to the task at hand...

I am torn. Devon, In a lot of ways I like the idea that you simply used a board which is basically an Atmega328 with a few support chips.... and integrated it into your board, versus actually having to solder them into your board. But this is an interesting trade off as then you still have to solder in several other small components, so you could have just soldered in an Atmega328... So if you see a hobbyist building your board, you should probably convert to through hole components, but if you are going to have them produced and populated, then it may be cheaper and easier to take the components off of the Arduino Pro Mini and put them on your board, as you will need to either find way to solder the Arduino Pro mini to your board, or add pins and sockets for it... And then your board like mine, requires the person building the remote control, to take it and then add everything, for example the 3 sliders, keypad, extra buttons, solder wires to them, maybe add 3 pin connectors for each of them to then plug into my/your board to make it work and then you have to be careful on your wire lengths and the like to get everything to fit...

Versus: Suppose I start off with an Arduino Mega pro board: $50 from Amazon.com cheaper if you go with DFRobot...
Then build a very large shield, that maybe is not fully rectangular as to leave out the location of the joysticks, but in this board, we mount the XBee, plus LCD like you did, can use as many IO pins as we want as we have lots, also we plug in the Keypad, plus mount in the Nav buttons, Power switch... On the bottom of this board we could add connectors for the joysticks, plus bring out some of the extra unused inputs to make it easier to add some custom things in. We could also for example add tilt sensor or leave that is a customization... We would probably not need very much logic actually on this board, simply routing, plus voltage conversion for XBee...

My guess is that this approach would have a slightly higher cost, but my guess is that it would make it a lot easier for others to build.

Not sure if this makes sense...
Kurt

I concur with kurte. waiting to see more.

Question on the Touch screen. I used a touch screen with a PIC a while ago. LINK i found that i kept having sausage finger issues when moving the sliders and had to use a stylist. It also used alot of pins on the PIC. Which screen would you recommend to use with the arduino?

Thanks

I did a little hacking with diptrace and started an all in one board... Not far yet, but this picture may give you an idea...



The board is about 8.5" by 4.75"...

Will git rid of all all SMT components... Shown with a Arduino mega to plug into... Also instead of putting all of the XBee stuff on the board, was thinking of simply putting in holes to mount a Parallax XBee adapter where you could simply have a hole in the top plate that this sticks part way into and you can plug your XBee in and see all of the RX/Tx/Power... leds... (http://www.parallax.com/StoreSearchResu ... ch=xbee+5v)

I show it with cutout for my 1.5" OLED. The boards leave out the portion where the joysticks would attach to top plate, could potentially include this and see about making a hole big enough... Would add connectors for Joysticks to plug into, likewise display, keypad... Obviously would change this for Larger display with touch screen...

What do you think, is this an approach that makes sense...

Kurt

looks promising, could attach it to the back of the face plate with some standoffs

As I mentioned in the previous post, I am thinking along the lines of my previous post, to instead of a GP board, build a board that is specific for this remote... But again before I go much farther, it would be good to get input on what we would like:
a) What type of display? Is Touch worth it? If not, OLED? Or the one that RobotDude/Devon wanted to use or something cheaper like the original.
b) Keypad? Gives tactile feedback, if so I would like to stick with the 16 bit keypad.
c) Sliders and or Knobs? Preference on location.
d) Other toggle switches?
e) Other inputs? 2 or 3 d accel?

I am open for options, especially from those who have used setups like this and or advanced RC...

If we can come up with a standard, maybe someone can make nice front plates and other case parts. Goal would be to make it easy for one most people with limited soldering skills.

The other thing I was playing with an all in one type of control like the Arbotix Commander, but with more stuff... The beginnings of this are shown below:

What I was trying to do was to emulate the controls of a PS2, that has XBee. The top switches are right angle double switches... Also shown with a small LCD display (Sparkfun 8x2)... Then would just need simple handles like the Arbotix ones...

Kurt

I really like to have the nice touch oled screen..
But i will go with what everyone would like.

I can cut G10 (Fiberglass) pannel once we are set.

As input, i never made a walking robot yet.. lol
So other could tell what is really helpfull on that point.

I think cheaper is the way to go since it will interest more people.

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Eric Nantel
Qc Canada

Always liked Robot... Now i am learning to make some...! Wonderfull...

So....?

HaHa...!

On my side i am better on the Case aspect.
So mostly wait for what we will use as hardware and how we want to go.

Then i could design a cut something..

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Eric Nantel
Qc Canada

Always liked Robot... Now i am learning to make some...! Wonderfull...

Been busy on other projects, including hacking on the Turnigy 9X... Would be nice if we could simply use some off the shelf parts with simple mods... I now have Smartyparts programmer installed, may add their 2nd board as well... (Different thread)

Assuming we do other type remote, not sure which approach would be best. Could go along the lines of Devon and Robot Dude were pursuing, but would probably then go with non SMT components, then easy for most people to solder. Could go along the line of my Atmega640P which my own has been using. Or could try along the lines I was working on that has as much of the stuff mounted on the main circuit board.

Will take a look again soon.

Kurt

Taking a 9X and case it in another way could be nice too.

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Eric Nantel
Qc Canada

Always liked Robot... Now i am learning to make some...! Wonderfull...

Yes I'm still looking to recase my 9x (as standard). Hint hint.....
From an animatronics point of view 'being able to move some of the pots and switches will make some of my projects far easier to control.

I'm going to move this next question to the 9x thread....

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Jonny Poole,
Freelance Concept Art & Animatronics, 3D Art and 3D Modelling, as well as Physical Modelling, Mechanical design, and illustration.
http://www.innerbreed.co.uk/
Create, Innovate, Inspire.