Driving that Pololu Balboa

Has anyone made the Balboa drivable? In other words, via a joystick or from keyboard arrow keys?

Has anyone integrated a distance sensor on the bot?

If not I’m going to try, if yes I could use some help

Hello.

Hopefully the code I posted for you in the forum thread here will be helpful, but if other community members have controlled a Balboa this way, we would also love to hear about it.

-Nathan

Nathan,

We’ll be working on the bot today. Thank you. It is my good intention to put together what we do and post it. We’re doing an 8 week Stem event once a week, so nothing will happen fast. The plan right now is to drive the bot with an iPhone. I have most of that working. I’ll keep you posted.

Best wishes,

Drew

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Nathan,

I’m hoping for some help. I want to add the bluetooth device to the Balboa and let the kids drive it. Here’s a video of a generic robot with and Arduino doing what I want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBieM-_nFbw

The problem is that I see no Serial examples with Rx Tx for the Balboa and it seems that #include <SoftwareSerial.h> won’t work with that board. This is well beyond my wheelhouse, can you make some recommendations?

Drew

There is a hardware serial port on pins 0 and 1 that can be accessed by the Serial1 object in the Arduino IDE. The ATmega32U4 microcontroller is also used on the Arduino Micro and Leonardo boards, so you might look for examples for those for more about how to use the port.

-Nathan

Nathan,

That’s what I tried, I will give it another shot. I got errors when I tried to compile with the include SoftwareSerial h

Thanks,

Drew

In case it is not clear, the hardware serial ports do not use the SoftwareSerial library. The Arduino MultiSerial example sketch has some code that might be helpful for you.

-Nathan

Nathan,

Ok that worked. Should be able to finish the project today. Thank you,

Drew