Robot building

Wow! could not have imagine that 4 years has past since I started this project. Actually, I had started it with the hopes that one of my three sons would have jumped in and completed it. tsk...tsk...oh well here we go. Just to summarize: In 2009 I acquired a broken electric wheelchair to be used as a base for robotic projects. I stripped it down got it working and planned to tap into the factory controller. Today, I hacked the controller, extended the internal ribbon cabling with additional FCI 6 pin Headers and a 8 way rotary switch. Here is the initial plan

The Splice

From the controller's documentation they are 2 wires that control the forward and reverse motion and two that controls the left and right steering. Other wires are ground, 2.5 v reference voltage and 5 volts power. Time to check is the hack to see if the controller works, and it did! with a little bit of fiddling. (I did not pay much attention to the way the FCI connectors were originally oriented.) The FCI Headers were source from http://www.mouser.com/ part number 89361-708LF The rotary switch is a generic one from ebay. The rotary switch is to be used for switching the forward/reverse & left/right input between other signal sources, for example RC receiver/ARDUPILOT or on board computer.