K9 Diaries - Motor Controller Issues.

K9 wiring

The inside on K9 are pretty straight forward. There is a Sabertooth motor controller. Its a 2x32 generation 3 controller, which means it has a USB interface to an application called DEscribe. With this you can monitor the inputs and outputs, which is handy. You can also specify the battery chemistry and many other bits and pieces.

I've just fixed the motor controller location between the drive wheels, so it is no longer on top of the batteries.

The other upgrade is fitting the Arduino Nano to control the tail servo. Again a little more thought  when I was designing the wag mechanism, so there was somewhere to mount it, but ti-wraps to the rescue, and a mount from the walker robot and it is secure. The next iteration will have a dedicate mount point. The point is the tail which now wags!

I decided to fit the 4 switch elements in the control panel, and wire them, and the I2C pins of the control panel Nano to the D-type connector which I've used as an interconnect. The I2C pins are fur future use / development. One of the switches can now be used to activate the wagging.

The switches are a low level implementation but a first step in getting things going.