CE432 2022 Fall
Lab 9
Name: Braden Morrow
Email: bdmorrow@fortlewis.edu

1. Lab 9 - Design a Two-Wheel Balancing Car

2. Introduction
The purpose of this tutorial was to control a Two-Wheel Balancing Car kit using a joystick. Most of the code is provided by Elegoo (the manufacturer of the kit we are using), however we worked on optimizing this code and making it compatible with our joystick and 2.4 GHz transievers.

3. Results
Week 1:

This week I decided to start slow by assembling the car and trying to understand/optimize the code provided by Dr. Li which provides the base functionality of the Tumbller.

The I2C implementation Elegoo provided is bloated because they just took the entire libraries for both I2C and the MPU6050 and added them to the project. This is way more than we need, so I wrote a simple function which pulls the accelerometer data. This file can be found in Tutorial 9 -> Tumbller -> MPU.cpp.

Figure 1 shows the basic balancing routine running after some debugging to find the right target angle for my Tumbller, using the optimized I2C routine.
Figure 1. Tumbller Basic Balancing Routine

The function Dr. Li provided to balance the Tumbller conventiently accounts for a car speed and rotational speed. I added some mode functionality and now the Tumbller can either idle or go through some basic motions (forward, backward, turn left, turn right). This was also a convenient time to stop the Tumbller from trying to balance when it was over rotated.

Figure 2. Tumbller Basic Movement Routine

Next week I plan to integrate the joystick and 2.4GHz transievers into the mode functionality.

Week 2:

This week I replaced the default "MSTimer" scripts with a basic timer based off of the Arduino's internal clock. This implementation was significantly shorter than theirs and works just as well. I used Timer1 to set the 5ms loop for the balance routine, and Timer2 to set a 100ms routine for getting the joystick input from the 2.4GHz transciever. I found that without an interrupt for the transciever the output would constantly get set to 0 while the balance routine was running.

In order to get the transciever working with the pinout of the Tumbller (which only has 5 pins not affected by other circuitry in the the bot) I had to implement a softSPI connection. The library for the transciever had a softSPI function built in so I just had to specify the pins that could be used by the transciever. Figure 3 shows the final product, a Tumbller which can be controlled by a joystick connected to a second arduino.
Figure 3. Tumbller Joystick Control

Hardware Connections:
For this project, the only part we had to wire to the Tumbller was the 2.4GHz transciever. Figure 4 shows those connections.


Figure 4. 2.4GHz Transciever Pinout

Code:
The changes to the code I made were mostly cleaning up their code and making it much smaller. Figure 5 shows the I2C code for the MPU6050 which replaced thousands of lines of code.


Figure 5. I2C for MPU6050

Next, I found some basic mode functionality to control the movement of the robot from Elegoo's origninal tutorial. Figure 6 shows the associated speeds for each of the movement modes.


Figure 6. Motion Mode Fucntionality

I then added the timers to control when we pulled the joystick input and ran the balance routine. The balanace routine is on a 5ms timer and the joystick input is on the 100ms input.

Figure 7. Timers for Balance and Radio Routine

Finally, here is the code used to get data from the 2.4 GHz Transciever.

Figure 8. 2.4GHz Transciever Code

Design Description:
The only thing worth noting here is that SoftSPI needs to be implemented on the transciever to enable it to use the new pins. These two changes to the library for the transciever turns on their built-in SoftSPI functionality.



Figure 9. 2.4GHz Transciever Library Changes for SoftSPI

5. Discussion
This project, while seeming straightforward at first, took the most time out of any project I've worked this semester. Essentially this just came down to chasing down bugs caused by my code interacting with some part of their code I was unaware of. One issue I found with this kit is that their "pinout" doesn't include any extra pins not directly used in the example functions they provided. In more than one case, this meant most of the pins were useless for getting any kind of input as they were already being used by components integrated into their PCB. However,, the Tumbller was much easier to work with than a custom made bot and provided a lot of useful script examples for controlling the bot.