Balanduino Self-Banlancing Car Control Board Microcontroller for Smart Vehicle Robot Arduino

Balanduino Self-Banlancing Car Control Board Microcontroller for Smart Vehicle Robot Arduino

Description:
The main board of the Balanduino kit consists of an Atmel 8-bit ATmega1284P AVR microcontroller running at 10MHz and with 128KB flash, 16KB RAM and 4KB EEProm. To enable the integration with the Arduino programming environment the board contains an FTDI USB to Serial converter chip, the FT232. This chip can be used for Arduino programming as well as Serial debugging.

The onboard 6-axis IMU is an MPU-6050, which is connected to the microcontroller using the I2C bus. This digital IMU contains a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis gyroscope, and when combined with a Kalman filter it gives you some very stable angle readings.

To enable the USB Host support for the Bluetooth controllers etc. the Maxim MAX3421E has been used. This chip is connected to the microcontroller with an SPI interface together with some control signals.

On each side of the main board there is a digital H-bridge motor controller IC, the VNH5180, capable of driving up to 8A continous current. Even though the stall-current of the supplied gearmotors is only 5A the VNH5180 gives you some extra room for security and expansion.

Both the power for the motors and the main board is supplied through the input screw terminal, where the supplied plug-leads that are connected to the battery are to be connected. An onboard polarity-protection circuitry protects the board against damage that would have been caused by connecting the battery in the reverse direction.

The board also contains a buzzer on a PWM pin and an onboard LED. The remaining I/O pins on the microcontroller have been broken out in two female pin headers for easy expandability.

These two female headers include 1x UART, 4x PWM outputs, 1x Interrupt and 5x Analog inputs. The pins used for I2C communication have been broken out as well.

Features:
Self-balancing
- The onboard sensor (6-axis IMU) is used to keep the robot balanced automatically at all times.
- The Balanduino will keep itself balanced right out of the box due to the highly optimized, tuned and preprogrammed PID loop used in the balancing-software controller-algorithm.
- By combining accelerometer, gyroscope and rotary encoder data, the Balanduino is able to keep itself balanced even when pushed.

Arduino-compatible
- The Balanduino is compatible with the Arduino IDE, thanks to the onboard ATmega1284P microcontroller.
- This means that you can upload new code and add your own features to the Balanduino in the well-known Arduino environment.
- The ATmega1284P has a flash size of 128KB of which approximately 127KB are at your disposal. When the full Balanduino firmware is programmed into the main board, including support for the most popular game controllers, approximatly half of the flash is used, leaving around 64KB of flash left for you to expand.
- However, it is relatively easy to modify the original Balanduino firmware to exclude unused controllers, thereby significantly reducing the code size.

USB Host capability - including Bluetooth controllers:
- Adding support to many new periphirals.
- By inserting the Bluetooth USB dongle that comes with the kit, you can control the Balanduino using our application for both Windows, Mac and Linux. Furthermore you can control the Balanduino with your Android phone by installing our application, which can be found in the Google Play Store.
- With all of the above applications you are wirelessly able to change various settings, including the PID values and maximum speed, and see the IMU data.

Game controllers:
Finally, as already mentioned you can control the Balanduino using the most popular game controllers listed below:

PS3 Controllers (Bluetooth dongle):
- Normal PS3 Dualshock controller
- PS3 Navigation controller
- PS3 Move controller

Xbox 360 controllers (Xbox Wireless receiver)
- Xbox 360 controller
- An Xbox Wireless receiver has to be used instead of the Bluetooth dongle: click here 

Wii controllers (Bluetooth dongle)
- Wiimote including support for the Motion Plus and Nunchuck extension
- Wii U Pro controller

Package included:
- 1 x Control Board