Roving robot with arduino and raspberry pi

So, continuing on from a previous post. Here is my roving robot build so far. I’ve not made as much progress with it as I would like, but I’ve had a few personal mishaps the last few days… Damn oil and gas industry! Below are a few snaps of the RDP (robot development platform). I’m using an arduino mega R3, adafruit motor shield v2.3, a pair of LM2596s adjustable voltage converters and a 3S 3300mah lips. I have still to finish off connecting up the voltage converters and I have still to fit the adafruit CC3000 WiFi breakout pcb.


As you can see I cut out a couple of access points, for the USB and power if I decide not to use the battery when testing.

Well it’s up and running. I carried out the first test, to get the four motors running. From the teat I determined a few issues. The first is that when the USB is plugged in and battery is disconnected, I get power flowing back to the step down converters, via the vin pin. I may have to add some isolation switches to prevent this. The second issue is that the motors seem to be pitifully under powered.

The motors are 6v with a gear box. I should have gone for the 12v versions but even then I think it would be under powered. On first power up I noted that 2 of the motors are running in the opposite direction, to rectify this I swapped the polarity of the wires to the motors.

Now that I know that the RDP motors work in principle, I can now look to integrating the CC3000.