Hello. I am looking for the best method to simply control two dc motors through a computer, with an interface. (I will be mounting a laptop on my robot so i can use serial or parallel)
I already made two h-bridges, which i am sure i will need. Can i use my basic x and make some sort of interface?
I barely know any programming, so im hoping to find someone who did something similar to me so i could use there program. I will also be using large motors(windshield wipers) so do you think it should have pwm too? Will it kill my batteries?

 

Hi,

Lots of questions to deal with. If you're hoping to run a robot off the laptop battery - don't. Not only will battery life be excessively short, all kinds of horrible electrical interference will be led into the laptop. They are brush motors. There is always a certain amount of sparking as the commutator segments come past the brushes, and sparks radiate lots of noise at many frequencies. Use something like a lawnmower battery (the riding kind).

Several manufacturers make PWM controller ic's. The spec sheets will give details about the control signals and hooking up the external drivers.

You'll probably find that the parallel interface is most easy to use for issuing the control signals, although it may be necessary to make an interim board to interface between the parallel port and the controller.

Any language that allows hardware level control of the pronter port will work for the robot control program. Most of your programming effort will be in setting up an input scheme that allows for entering directions for the robot to follow. If that was XBasic you were speaking of, it will do the trick. There should be hundreds of sites dedicated to robots and the control thereof. Probably with program examples, too.

 

I will not be using the laptop battery, i will run everything off of some lead acid batteries ( i havent bought them yet) the basicx, i mean the bx-24 from netmedia. I do not know any coding, and i am pretty sure it can be done using this, but cannot find anyone else who has done something similar. As i said, i already made h-bridges which i am sure i will need. Any further information will be appreciated.

 

I think using servo motor is also easy.

It already consists of gear set. You just generate PWM to controller the direction of rotation.