Episode 48: See Ben Heck's Motorized Wheelchair Episode

Is the code available somewhere? I've had a head-scratcher over the same tank steering with a stick thing,

Problem is that I currently have 3 ranges to do different things because I can't figure out how to do it in one continuous range, which cases a weird discontinuity, basically within a deadzone in the middle left/right is directly mapped to wheel speed with one being reversed as you'd expect, and above and bellow the deadzone the vertical axis is mapped to wheel speed and if you move left/right it reduces the speed on that side compared to the other, this works fine as long as I never hold full left/right and move the vertical axis between those 3 ranges, if I do it suddenly changes behavior in a very ungraceful manner, it's going forwards and to the left, bring the throttle back to the middle and it suddently spins in place full speed, but it was slowing down as I brought back the throttle and similar.

Here is my actual arduino code: http://pastebin.com/5KSYyRvM  I've basically split the controls over 2 sticks one being used for vertical and one horizontal but combined they're the same as ben's, and I've split them into 8 distinct variables for ease of math and the deadzone part is handled by the remote controller side. (Arduino in the remote as well that grooms the numbers a bit to ease the robot's burden).

I also have directly mapped tank steering controls, vertical axis of each stick directly controls the motors which works nicely, but it's not very intuitive for people used to driving cars.

Any help figuring out how to get something close to that "graph" above with a single continuous function would be great.

If you're interested here is what the code lives in:

I did something like this on our AGV at work.  I ended up using the 4 quadrant approach.  It wasn't a single continuous function, but it didn't feel real weird at the border conditions.  I also had a deadzone around each axis so you could achieve straight moving pretty easily.  I'll see if I can write up some pseudo-code from it tomorrow.

Much appreciated, as said I already have deadzones set up on the controller end, my arduino based remote controller does a lot of the heavy number crunching to get more "usable" variable values to work with here is the stick related code in the controller:

http://pastebin.com/8xDRbLxj

the values might look odd but I pulled these sticks out of a very old logitech gamepad, I've basically made the middle dead-zone the value is showed with the stick centered +/- 100 etc, same with top and bottom values, the hole in the enclosure stops the stick moving far enough to engage the pot's whole range, I basically moved the sticks around to different places, wrote down the numbers in the serial monitor and adjusted up/down as needed to get good ranges including a "medium" deadzone in the middle and a bit of a deadzone at the far ends in all directions to ensure you don't need to push hard against the edges. The values are unique per stick due to them not being flawed in quite the same ways etc.

Hey, send me an email at colecago at gmail.com

Hey, send me an email at colecago at gmail.com