How to find compatible components? accelerometer, microcontroller, transmit reciever

[JAMES IRVINE]

Hello there everyone I was wondering if anyone could give me information regarding a project I have. I have a design where an accelerometer would be used to detect headmovement or tilt of the head where the information would be processed by a microcontroller and transmitted to a remote control car. (head movement forward would = acceleration , tilt to the right would turm the wheels to make the car go right etc)

My design also involves a microcontroller at the recieving end i.e. mounted on the car to provide control for the motors to control steering and speed.

I was wondering if anyone could tell me which microcontrollers could be used for this project and what would be the best way to transmit the signal.

Also how complicated would it be to make the car to go at a speed relative to the tilt of their head if it would make things easier to have a single speed whether in forward or reverse I would be pleased enough with that.

 

[astronomerroyal]

I can't offer much advice and maybe you've already solved your issue, but almost any microcontroller will be capable enough to address this task. Ideally one with ADC (to read in the signal from a presumably analogue accelerometer) and a serial module built in (so you don't have to code that stuff yourself) for sending the info to the vehicle. Yes, a range of acceleration, steering would be easy - not really any more difficult than just having forwards/backwards.

For example I'm using the generously sized PIC 18F4520 - its MSSP (serial module - both SPI and I2C protocols) is straightforward to use, as are its ADCs. Code snippets and libraries are available everywhere, free C compiler (C18), development environment etc... PICs are all I know, but are popular for a reason.

Just today I got an 3-axis accelerometer from Sparkfun, they have several. A 2 axis one would suffice for your purposes.

As for radio stuff. You'll need an encoder/decoder with a modest number of channels (one for steering, one for acceleration etc.) - LINX is often mentioned but I'm sure there are many others. As for receiver/transmitter I'm currently playing with 433MHz stuff from a robotics store.

If you're starting from scratch it might be a long road, but I started with an ambitious project and eventually it succeeded. Good luck.

 

[ScareCrow]

They have everything you need for what you described but there are many more.

Parallax Home