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Afternoon all,
Having built an invertible thwackbot, ive realised that when it flips over the controls will be reversed so i was wondering if anybody had ever made a flip circuit to compensate for this?
Ive seen that some of the dual channel ESCs out there have this feature running off of a 3rd channel on the Tx but i was hoping there was a stand-alone bit of kit that can do the same thing.
Cheers
Dan
Do as I do. Turn the tx around in your hands.
It isn't pretty but it works :)
Some of the high end Tx's have this function built in.
A thwack bot will be inverting so frequently, either by making attacks or by bouncing off opponents, that to be activating and deactivating a 'flip' function would actually cause more problems than it solved.
If it were me I would colour either side of the robot so you know which way up it is and learn to control the machine upside down from the start with no additional aids.
As a piece of history, in RW S3 Stinger went out in round one to mace after 2 minutes of mad, random and chaotic bouncing. Next year it ranked 3rd. With more driving practice the machine went from uncontrollable by the driver to unfathomable by its enemies.
It may be possible to make a device that reverses it automatically, I would use an accelerometer rather than a tilt switch as should give you more control as to when it reverses, then use an arduino mini or something to take the signal from the rx and just reverse it and send it out to the escs. I imagine you would need a small delay between when it first sense it has flipped over during which tk continues to check (ie has to be upside down for say 1 second before to switches the controls to avoid false positives)
Probably a lot more hassle than its worth but it is an option.
The IMX-1 mixer will do the job: http://www.robotcombat.com/products/RL-IMX1.html. Like Alex said, it might be more bother than its worth.
cheers guys. Think ill see how it goes. Might not be a problem!
When you say 'invertable thwak bot', do you mean one that is going to constantly flip (Stinger, Saint, MONTE style) or one that will only go upside down if flipped? If its going to constantly rotate/invert, don't bother with a flip switch, it will never work.
Its of the type which has a "top and bottom" so to speak. If it proves a problem, ill have a think through the options
quick picture of the bot!
Attachment 5107
Im after the same thing for 720...
Nick... i saw that board but it mentions it only works with escs that can be calibrated... i pressume it wont work with botbitz tz85's?
As I understand it, when the IMX-1 inverts the signal it also inverts any trims you may have set in the transmitter. If you don't need a trim to match the neutral point in the radio to neutral in the ESCs then the IMX-1 should work OK for you.
I'm a piss-poor programmer, but it doesn't seem too difficult to use a Teensy MCU board https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy31.html and an accelerometer breakout board from Sparkfun to make a versatile and automatic steering inverter board, which could be programmed with the trims you need and maybe other functions as well. If you do the channel mixing in the radio, then the programming becomes even easier.
For an accelerometer, I'd reccomend the Sparkfun ADXL193. Really tough and fairly cheap.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9332