Today, I'm going to share with you my Armdroid Remote Controller project, which was quickly hacked together for demonstrating the Armdroid 1 during a recent meeting of volunteers at TNMOC.
The circuit makes use of a single TSOP4838 IR receiver module along with some rather cleaver programming that decodes key presses and operates various Armdroid functions.
I'll be including the source code for this project as an example sketch in the forthcoming release of Armdroid Library on GitHub.
The project works surprisingly well, although movements to preset positions are made point-2-point (P2P), which is slightly different to continuous path movements. This is after all, a demonstration, although could be easily extended to support waypoints and recording/playback of movements.
I've been using an old Sky remote control handset, you'll need to change the scan codes to match your hardware, although instructions will be included how to do this.
Connecting an infrared receiver module is relatively simple, the sensor output is connected to a spare digital input on the microcontroller.
ArmdroidShield (version 1) utilizes pins 2-9 for connecting to the Armdroid's 8-bit parallel interface, so pin 10 was chosen for this purpose, along with +5V and Gnd connections. There are many common IR receiver modules available. Check the datasheet for your device to ensure that you connect it correctly.
The software works by decoding the IR signals to digital pulses that correspond to buttons on the remote. A scan code lookup table is then used to assign Armdroid functions to key presses. This table uses function pointers to simplify the program logic, also included are methods for Rolling/Pitching the Gripper, along with routines for calculating target offsets when moving to new positions.
