Help building firts rover project/ Mission planner tutorial needed

Hello, I’m new to this RC world.

I have the parts to build a quadcopter, but firts I want to build a rover to test Mission Planner and so. I have the navio+ connected to the MP but now I’m stuck. I don’t know how to connect the throttle H-bridge, and how to control via joystick (Joystick is calibrated and all).

I have readed all navio+ docs, and searched in internet, I can’t find any tutorial step by step for rovers with navio+ and mission planner.

I would appreciate any tutorial step by step for a rover or similar (for the quad I have de uavmatrix tutorial). I came to test navio+ but I found that there are nothing about rovers, and Mission Planner is very complicated for me.

Thanks!

Hi,

I have a rover controlled with RPi/Navio. The motors are controlled with a Sabertooth 12A.
You say you plan to use a H-bridge to control the motors of your rover. The problem with H-brigdes is, they do not work on simple PWM input. PWM controls the motor speed, but to change motor direction/brake/freewheel, you have to switch 2 other inputs on and off and that is not possible with Navio alone. Navio is meant to control RC compatible ESCs.
The easiest/cheapest way would be to buy two RC brushed ESCs to control the motors.
Have a look at rover.ardupilot.com, there you find examples for building a APM based rover.

hello,

I am trying to use a sabertooth 2x12 and I was wondering if you knew what configuration is needed to get it to work with the navio 2. Currently we have switch 1 set to low and it only allows me to control one set of wheels on our rover with a skid steering setup. any help would be appreciated.

Hi,

first have look at the dip switch wizard, provided by dimension engineering:

www.dimensionengineering.com/datasheets/SabertoothDIPWizard/start.htm

There are two ways to do skid steering:

  1. Let ardurover control the skid steer. Set the sabertooth to non skid steer operation and ardurover to “skid steer out 1”
    This way ardurover knows it is controlling a skid steer vehicle and you can use pivot turns. etc.
    Problem is, the ardurover skid steer implementation still sucks. It only uses maximum 50% throttle for steering/direction control. If you have a heavy rover with a lot of wheels, it will not be able to turn on the spot.

  2. Enable skid steering in the sabertooth controller. Much better control, but Ardurover (skid steer out = 0) will not know about the skid steering ability of your rover, so no pivot turns in automated driving. You can pivot in manual mode of course.