How to wire up a gyro

[ewan]

I wondered where in the circuit a gyro would need to be placed. I guess it must be in line with the steering channel, but must it be before or after the mixer? If it had to be after, it would make things more difficult, as the mixer is built into the H5s...
Cheers, Ewan
http://www.micro-maul.co.ukwww.micro-maul.co.uk

[kinforester]

How to wire up a gyro

Ewan just put in the steering channel form the Rx to H5 and see if that works, i can see it working any other way.

GORD

[madoverlord]

How to wire up a gyro

Wire it between radio and mixer on the steering channel. You must mix in the robot.

Make sure that you get a gyro with both heading lock and a separate gain channel. You need to disable the gyro if you go inverted otherwise youll get gyro death spin.

Some people only enable the gyro when the bot is being commanded to move forward or backward, doing this with a transmitter mix (elevator controlling the gain channel).

I recently got a futaba gyro that seems to work very well and is very small:

http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/WTI0001P?&I=LXXF87http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/WTI0001P?&I=LXXF87

Enjoy, they are a lot of fun.

[wenman]

How to wire up a gyro

Gyros are great as long as you make sure they are working in the correct direction before you use them.

I used an ICG gyro in my heavy and it eliminated all the steering problems. Unfortunately it has a tendancy to reprogram itself if it picked up to much noise and could send it into a crazy spin. But I did manage to get it to work upside down since my mixer has an on board reverse switch that reverses the drive and steering when flipped over.

Richard
Team Mayhem

[kinforester]

How to wire up a gyro

If Ewan is using H5 controllers there is no seperate mixer ,the two controllers are conected together and sort the mixing between them, one controller is conected to the Rx throtle output and the other controller to the Rx steering output ,conect the gyro in the later.

GORD

[armadrillo]

How to wire up a gyro

What advantages do you get by fitting a gyro?
Built 2 heavies in the past with a now defuncked team and didnt even consider it.

Building a my first feather and was considering fitting one.
Hoping to have it near finished for Folkstone to gage some feed back.

[wenman]

How to wire up a gyro

To a large extenet it depends on the robot design:
4 wheel drive its next to pointless
2 wheel drive with wheels abount central possibly improve its ability to go in a nice straight line.
2 wheel drive with wheels at one end well I couldnt drive mine in anything remotely close to a straight line without a gyro.

It also depends on the control system and mechanics of your drive.

Best idea is probably build it and see if you need a gyro. Ie if your having trouble controlling it. If you dont need it to improve the control then its just more money and another thing to go wrong.

Richard Wenman
Team Mayhem

[armadrillo]

How to wire up a gyro

Cheers richard
My heavy had 2 wheel drive to the rear. It was ok going forward but a right pain in reverse.

The feather will be 2 wheel drive with the wheels about 2/3 back.
Just have to wait and see how it drives without.

Glen Doherty
Now of Team Major Tom

[andrew_gardner]

How to wire up a gyro

Whether you need a gyro also depends on top speed and how far apart your wheels are, the further apart the less likely you are going to need a gyro. My heavy, Blitz, had a top speed of 11.1mph, and 2 wheel drive with the wheels approximately in the middle and approx 61cm from the middle of one tread to the other. I seem to remember that the robot was fairly easy to drive on the smooth Robot Rumble Arena, but more of a handful on the more battle-worn Roaming Robots Arena. Basically, I think that if your robots got 2 wheel drive and a top speed of 12mph or more, a gyro is a very useful thing to have.

[armadrillo]

How to wire up a gyro

My robot will have a top speed of 10.5mph and the wheels will be approx 40cm apart from the middle of the treads. I should have all the bits together next week so i can finally start building the chassis. I will try it without a gyro and see where that gets me first.

[fluppet]

How to wire up a gyro

Can I ask a few newbie questions?

Does the gyro always output a countering effect to a rotation, or does it try to match the rotation to the joystick input?

That is (and Im a bit hazy on analogue remote control, since Ive always planned on doing things with radio modems and some embedded controllers, so forgive me if this is nonsense): assuming the turn amount is represented by a voltage level after the receiver has decoded it and before it goes into the speedo, and presuming the gyro outputs a voltage proportional to its rate of turn, do you end up with something trying to match the two voltages (so the rate of turn matches the requested rate of turn) or do you have the gyro pushing back against the joystick input? Or is it entirely down to how you wire it up?

I guess which is more desirable is partly down to the quality of your radio signal - if you can reliably get go in a straight line out of the receiver then getting the gyro to match it, enabling you to describe a smooth curve if you want one, would be nice. If you have trouble getting a clean straight line signal then having a range in which youre effectively locked to going straight (and after a bit of resistance you can then start rotating) might have benefits as well.

Im presuming the former (matching the output of the gyro to the turning signal) is what happens, but Im not so sure of myself that I think I shouldnt ask. :-)

Is my model of how a gyro behaves (voltage change according to rate of rotation) accurate? Im only ever likely to use one plumbed into the A/D converter on a PIC, but the chances of me using one there are quite high. Intelligence is nothing without control, and all that. Having to undo any in-built electronics which attempt to assist analogue control would be a pain.

Assuming the gyros we get are the ones pushed by the radio helicopter community (my understanding is that theyre pretty much obligatory there, unless youre *very* good), does that mean that we have some extra channels available - in addition to horizontal rotation (yaw) which presumably gets used on most robots, pitch and roll are available too? Or do model choppers just have three gyros? Not that I can see much of a use for the other channels, but itd be nice to plan before I go parts shopping. :-)

Hopefully Ive not just confused anyone reading this more than they were to begin with. Thanks to anyone who can put me out of my misery!

--
Fluppet
Maybe I should look into driven differentials...

[wenman]

How to wire up a gyro

Andrew

The ansewer to Does the gyro always output a countering effect to a rotation, or does it try to match the rotation to the joystick input? Is dependant on the gyro.

Your standard RC gyro does try to stop the vehical turning. Top of the range gyros have systems that try to get the vehicle to do what you input in the joystick so if you say straight ahead it goes straight ahead if you say gentle curve it does a gentle curve.

I believe that a lot of roboteers use the simpler gyros and simply turn them off or reduce their gain when they want to make a turn. However this means another radio channel.

The RC gyros that are used in robot wars dont work on voltage they work on a pulse system as do the servos. I believe that the pulses vary in length from one 1 millisecond at one end of travel on the servo to 2ms at the other end. These pulses are then repeated.

The gyro takes in this 1-2ms pulsing signal (RC signal) from the steering channel on the receiver. Looks at what this signal is asking the vehicle to do and what the vehicle is actually doing decides what it should tell the speed controller to do to correct for any discrepancy and puts out its own RC signal to the servo (or in a robots case a speed controller or some other interface).

As for how many channels you have on your radio control and receiver thats up to you and your design of robot. You may well need the following:
Drive speed
Steer
Weapon
Gyro on off (or possibly gain depending on the complexity of the gyro)
Main on off for robot (not in the rules and possibly not applicable if its a feather but it is advisable on heavies to have a way to kill the power to your robots weapon and drive remotely. This doesnt replace the removable link its just added safety in case your robot goes crazy.)

You can get transmitters with 2, 3, 4 ,6 or even more channels.

I hope this helps. If it doesnt make any sense you can always come and have a go at me at the East Anglia regional social.

Richard Wenman
Team Mayhem

[wenman]

How to wire up a gyro

Goodness thats probably the longest post Ive ever made.

[fluppet]

How to wire up a gyro

Cheers Richard (I will, and Im clearly rubbing off on people!)

Im not sure if Id got the wrong end of the stick originally, or persuaded myself since - I thought the pulse width encoding only went as far as the receiver, and the speed controller worked purely as a step-up/mixer. I guess keeping things encoded longer is a bit more fail safe. Im not sure whether it helps or hinders my cunning plans for microcontrollers - lose an A/DC, gain an interrupt driven timing loop. Meh. Does this mean speed controllers also only have about 16 levels of gradation per channel, or are they completely analogue? (16 is a figure I think Ive seen for transceiver granularity, but I dont know how universal it is - it seems a bit coarse for the effects a gyro could have).

I guess Id presumed that the speed controller took all its input channels on independent wires, whereas the signal can be de-multiplexed internally this way.

Not that it helps with some of my dafter ideas (so many channels, so few speed controllers... *here* MOSFET MOSFET MOSFET) but youve deconfused me a lot, so thank you. :-)

Presumably if Im trying to get a reading out of a gyro (without hooking it to the receiver), this means I need to feed a neutral pulse into it?

I think my talk of channels regarding the gyro was a bit ambiguous - I wasnt talking R/C channels (at least, directly), I meant that I wondered if a radio controlled helicopter gyro would give a separate output for each axis of rotation (roll, pitch, yaw). What youd do with them on a ground-based robot is another matter, but I just wondered if they were there.

As for the number of channels I need: for my first robot, not many (Im occasionally practical - two analogue, two digital will be fine). As for interesting designs... my most effective (predicted) design has six (possibly seven) analogue and at least four (probably many more) transmitted digital channels; there are sixteen analogue outputs from the control system and at least twenty digital ones. Not counting telemetry. Youll know it when you see it (but not for a year or two)! Theres a reason Im leaning towards digital control. :-) (Oh, and its slightly more practical than it sounds.)

Thanks again for the help, and sorry to slightly subvert the subject (although Im nearer to on-topic than I usually manage when I do this!)

--
Fluppet
(Worryingly, *not* one of my longer posts.)

[fwsorg]

How to wire up a gyro

Certainly I know that the 1024 bit of the high end tranmitters (like the futaba 9 channel thingamy) represents a resolution of 1024 steps per channel. I think most normal kit works on 512. I may be wrong tho. Andrew, if you can modify your transmitter to transmit whatever you choose, and make a corresponding receiver, you will be on cloud 9 in terms of robot control. Any old serial protocol (RS232 for example) would be a great way of controlling your robot. Unlimited channels (or as good as), and of course much more functionality. I would certainly do this if I was more confident about taking my nice transmitter to bits :-)