Zumo Robot for Arduino With MKR WAN 1310

Robotics and electronics discussion Electronics
1

Hi, I am currently working on a project, where I have to control a Zumo robot with an MKR WAN 1310 Arduino. I know that it is working well with an Arduino Uno, but I need to use the LoRa technology for communication.
What I tried :

  • connect PWM output of mkr on pin 9 and 10 of Zumo, trying to control rotation motor speeds (nothing happened)
  • connect GND and Vin on 5V and GND of mkr, when the zumo is on, the mkr wan is ON, so its working.
    Help me with clear instructions, I’m new in this domain.
    Thanks for your help !
2

Hello.

I am not very familiar with the MKR WAN 1310 Arduino, but after a brief search a have a few concerns.

Firstly, if you’re trying to use our library, please note that unless you are using an ATmega168-, ATmega328P- or ATmega32U4-based controller, it will use analogWrite() for the motor PWM signals. In this case, according to the documentation for the MKR WAN 1310 Arduino, it does not support analogWrite() on pin 9 (only pins 0-8, 10, 12, A3, and A4). So, you will likely need to modify the library to make that work. It sounds like you might not have connected direction signals. These are just simple HIGH or LOW digital signals, so it should be fine to just connect pins 7 and 8 on your Arduino to pins 7 and 8 on the Zumo shield.

Next, it sounds like the MKR WAN 1310 expects a regulated 5V power source on VIN (listing 6V as the max), so powering it from the VIN pin on the Zumo shield (which is a regulated 7.5V) is probably not a good idea. You might consider using an appropriate step-up/step-down regulator to regulate the battery voltage (i.e. from the VBAT pin) to 5V for your MKR WAN 1310 board.

Lastly, the Zumo shield uses the 5V and 3.3V outputs from the Arduino as logic power for some of the components (such as the motor driver), so you will need to supply those from your MKR WAN 1310 board. It looks like you can do this by connecting the 5V pin on the MKR WAN 1310 board to the 5V pin on the Zumo shield and the VCC pin on the MKR WAN 1310 to the 3.3V pin on the Zumo shield.

If you still have problems after accounting for all of that, could you post your code and pictures of your setup that show all of your connections?

Brandon