{"id":127,"date":"2009-11-01T21:30:56","date_gmt":"2009-11-01T16:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coldsolder.wordpress.com\/?p=41"},"modified":"2026-05-28T18:08:45","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T17:08:45","slug":"41","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/2009\/11\/01\/41\/","title":{"rendered":"Wireless Rover with ATMega32 AVR Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few years ago, I tried to build a wireless rover using a 40-pin ATMega32 <\/strong>Atmel Microcontroller and an old Nikko R\/C Jeep. This was something of a continuation project from my days in university. The board was from Futurelec<\/a>, and it was a pretty handy little board with a bunch of ports. I don’t think they sell that anymore, and its now been succeeded by more advanced AVRs. A good replacement would be this<\/a> board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Essentially, the motors from the R\/C Jeep were reused by replacing the original DC motor control circuits with a dual H-Bridge DC motor control module. The inputs to the H-Bridge; 2 inputs for each motor were directly driven by PORTC of the ATMega board. 1 motor for the main drive and another for the steering, which is the standard configuration for most R\/C cars. If you don’t have the time to build your own, you can get a pre-assembled Dual Motor Driver from Robokits India<\/a> at about Rs 300.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A BlueSMiRF<\/a> Bluetooth Modem was connected to the onboard USART on the ATMega board and mounted vertically. Two sets of power needed to be used, 6V for the motors and driver circuitry and a 9V supply (regulated to 5V) for the ATMega board and BlueSMiRF module.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sensors were quite simple. Micro switches attached to the bumpers and an ultrasonic distance meter buried under the board with its sensors peeping through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The software on the ATMega board was in C and included modules to scan the sensors constantly, send status to the host computer via Bluetooth and most importantly, receive commands from the host computer via Bluetooth. The host computer control center comprised of a browser application that would run Java Server Pages which in turn communicated with the rover over a Bluetooth COM port. The host computer software was Java at its core with a little bit of JSP and Ajax for the User Interface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The finished rover was somewhat crude, but hey, it worked well enough. Manual control and navigation was possible from the internet thanks to JSP, and the sensors could be read directly off the rover; first via the internet and then locally over wireless Bluetooth. The possibility of adding a webcam and then streaming live video onto the internet did occur, but the R\/C Jeep chassis and the available power would be a bottleneck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, I tried to build a wireless rover using a 40-pin ATMega32 Atmel Microcontroller and an old Nikko R\/C Jeep. This was something of a continuation project<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,8,26,6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bluetooth","category-create","category-robotics","category-technology","category-tinker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions\/129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}