Welcome back.

So in this video, I want to do an overview of the fee tech FT.

Hyphen, emcee hyphen zero zero two hyphen S.

M.

C are doing a vehicle platform.

So this is the vehicle platform that I use for my personal projects.

I've purchased a number of them over the years, and I like these little vehicle platforms for a number of reasons.

The first reason I like it is the price point of vehicle platform.

So for what you get, it only costs.

Use generally should only cost you 17 to $20.

Now I do so see some unscrupulous vendors out there trying to sell this thing for $80.

Don't buy for $80.

Ah, low price point for this particular platform is $17.

A reasonable price point is $20 depending If you need one or not.

I might spend $25 on one of these things, but realistically, anything over than that and then it gets to be a bit ridiculous.

so again, for 17 to $20.

I really like that on then when you actually get the platform, things that I like is the overall size of the platform.

So the cool part is, is you have this upper deck, so you actually have two decks.

So you can on the upper deck.

You can put your Arduino board whatever we know board that you're going to use.

And then on the lower deck, you can put sensors.

This is where I shove a battery pack.

So if I'm using this, I just shove the battery pack under there, so it gives you a lot of room on one of things that will show you over the work bank.

Had it really, like is the motor controller for this particular platform is very small.

Now, if you're looking to create vehicles with Arduino, generally you're either going to use a motor module or a motor shield.

And with both of those devices, those devices are rather large.

The nice thing about this is this is rather small.

Uh, you know, I don't know, slightly bigger than 1/4.

So if you're going to make a small vehicle, that something nice to have, because again, you don't just don't need that much space in order to be able to control your motors.

So this is basically the overall what this vehicle platform looks like once you put it together.

Now, when you purchase it, when you purchase it, you're just gonna get a little box in the mail that looks like this.

You're gonna open it up, and then you're gonna get a lot of components in here.

And then again, it's one of those things that all these individual components costs a little bit of money.

So getting them all together, I think you save a couple of ducks again.

If you buy this thing for $20.

$20?

Yeah, less than $25.

You're probably getting getting a good deal on this, but it comes with two motors s o.

The important thing with this is that these air to standard motor so they're not continuous servo motors.

That might be a little confusing there just to standard motors.

You get the wheels again when you go out there to to to buy stuff around, we know vehicles.

Just because you bythe motors doesn't mean you get the wheels with these you get, you get the wheels and you get the tires.

So that's another couple of bucks.

You get the castor wheel in front.

That's that thing there.

Yeah, of course.

You get the frame, you get the frame, obviously, and then you get the motor controller.

So this is the FT hyphen s M c.

Hyphen to Cannell motor controller.

And what's cool about this motor controller One.

As you can see, it's relatively small, but to basically, it allows you to interact with your electric motors as if they're continuous servo motors.

Uh, that makes it a little bit easier to control things like speed.

So when you're moving this, though, the wheels forward or when you're trying to do more complicated maneuvers with your vehicle being able to control the wheels as if they're continuous servo motors can can actually make life a little bit easier.

So that's what this does in particular.

It is important, understand?

If you buy this when you're going to controlling the motors with this motor controller, you're going to control them using functions for servo motors, not for standard motors.

So that's just one of those things to keep in mind so that let's go over the work.

Vic, I'll show you a little bit of the difference between this motor controller and motor module and a shield, and I'll show you some of the other things that I like about this particular platform.

So here's a little bit of a comparison between the feet tech to to channel motor controller and motor module and a motor shield again.

When you're looking to create a vehicle most of time are looking to try to make the vehicle as small and light.

It's possible.

And what I really like about this little motor controller is you can see how small it is in comparison to the other ways that you may control motors.

So this is a motor module.

So this is what you generally would use in order control motor.

And as you can see, it's just a lot larger than this little SMC is.

It's also a lot taller.

So again, if you're gonna put you know, this controller on a vehicle just very easy to kind of screw this in some kind of out of the way place, where is it you're gonna have a full fledged motor module.

You gotta figure out, like, literally where you going to put something in that size That's important, especially if you're looking at something like if you're going to use this platform.

So this is from DF Robot, and this is a rather small platform.

So again, what you wanted things to be thinking about with your vehicle platforms is literally from a space perspective.

Where are you going?

Put things like the sensors and controllers.

Having a small little controller like this can simply be very valuable to have in your tool bag, even if you're not using feet texts actual frame for for dealing with the vehicle s.

So, as you can see, that's that.

And then this is the motor shield.

So the motor shield obviously has a lot more functionality than the little to channel comptroller does.

But again, it's very large.

It's a shield.

It goes on top of the art we know board, and so when you're looking at size constraints, that could be a bit of a problem.

So this is what we're looking at when we're looking at the different sizes of the ways that you can control motor with an Arduino.

So now that we've seen the difference in size is between the different types of ways that you can control a vehicle platform.

Let's actually d'oh and see how this is all wired up.

If we're going to be creating our own Lovie a platform.

So this vehicle here, literally.

All I've done is I've coated to go forward, to go back to turn left and turn right.

So there's no sensor is currently on here.

There's no WiFi connection.

This is this basically right now, I could just automatically go forward, back left, right.

There is no other intelligence or no other sensors to it.

So just keep that in mind on.

So we're gonna do is we're gonna take a look down at the bottom of this.

And so this is how the controller is normally connected to this particular frame s so you haven't nice and screwed down here again.

It's nice.

It's out of the way.

You don't have to worry about it once you've connected it now on the back of it.

So on the back of it, when you're taking a look, you see the two problems back there that's what's going to connect to the motors.

So you're gonna plug this in?

The important thing is is when you plug the motors in that they should be opposite.

So you can see how the little copper connectors here and then you see just the black here, so that's important, understand?

So if you have it like this, that's gonna be wrong.

Basically, you want to see the copper connectors for one, and you want to see just the back of it for the other.

And that that make sure that when you tell the wheels to go forward that both of them are going forward in, both of them are going backward and you can you can control them in the exact same way.

So that's the important thing there, then from there, basically, we have two sets of cables up front.

So that's again.

You can see the 2 to 3 connectors here.

One of the important things understand is you only need to give it one this set of power.

So you actually see positive negative on both sides and all you need to do in order to power This is Thio.

Do it on one side So you have this three pin connector.

They plug into one side.

One of the pens will be for negative for ground.

One of pens will be for positive, and then one of the pens will be for signals.

When you're looking at this, the white wire that they give you is forcing.

So this will then control things, right hand wheel.

And this one will control the left hand.

Well, if we flip this over, take a look at the top.

Then what we can see is for the power connectors.

So this is that three wire cable from the bottom.

So the power connectors all I do is I plugged the red into the five volt.

I upload the black into the ground, and that's all I need to do for power again.

One of the nice things with this is I don't need any additional power.

When I do my projects, I literally just power this thing off a little little USB power supplies.

Then, from there, you just have the controller wires.

And so with that, all you do is you're gonna plug those controller wires into digital pets.

So I have this set, and so the right hand side.

I think it is.

Goes to Penn ate and the other one goes to Penn nine, and that's all you have to do.

So the power comes directly from here, and then you plug in tow pen eight and then nine.

And now I can create code to make this vehicle do whatever I want.

So from here, if I was going to do something, said, he's creating Thomas vehicle again, add sensors or whatever.

What I can do is I can put I can add these sensors to the front and then again, just run the connectors to the digital pens.

And I have all the digital pens I have all the other analog pens available.

The only pins that I'm gonna be using are the these two here.

So with that, let's go over to the computer so I can show you how this code works.

Code is very simple, but again, you haven't been used to it before.

You may not.

You may not realize how you're supposed to code for this thing, So here's the basic code.

In order to be able to make this vehicle move forward, move back, move.

Let and move right, Eh?

So this is pretty simple code.

There's not a lot to it again.

The main thing to remember is that with this particular motor controller, it makes the Arduino think the motors are continuous servo motors, not normal, just motors.

So we're going to be interacting with them.

We have to add the library for servers servos.

So the first thing that we're going to do with my new pound include and then we're going to include the servo library.

So this gives all the instructions all the functions.

In order to make servo motors work past that, we're going to have to tell the yard we know how to reference the two different servo motors.

So we say servos, we say servo.

And then the 1st 1 we're going to create is l Service.

This is for the left servo motor.

They were going to say servo, and then we're going to do our service.

That's for the right servo motor.

So l servo now references a servo and our servo references a servo.

Then we're going to go down and we're going to go to the void to set up.

So we're going to set up the environment.

So here we're going to do is we're gonna then say l a servo dot Attash to pin eight.

So this is too big Digital pen eight.

So we're saying L servo is that digital pin eight were going to say our servo dot attack digital pen nine.

So now they are we know knows where l servo and our survival our on the board passed that it gets to be pretty simple.

So the important thing to understand when you're dealing with continuous servo motors is when you're talking about speed when you're talking about going forward, going backwards and stopping what we're going to be talking about putting in the number anywhere between 1 to 180.

So when you saying 90 what 90 says to the continuous servo motor is to stop, Don't do anything, Don't move.

Stop.

So when you say l servo dot right 90 are servo dot right 90 that tells both motors to stop, So that is the middle position.

What we're going to do here is we're going to delay for 1000 milliseconds or one second, and then we're going to tell the servos to go for work.

So it's important to understand anything between 1 to 89 tells the servo motors to go forward and then its speed.

So when you're going forward, do you lower the number, the faster it's going to go.

So when we say 80 when we say 80 that means it's going to go forward relatively slowly.

If we said 10 it means it will go forward very quickly.

So when you're talking about going forward, basically the further you are away from 90 the faster it will be.

So when you say 80 that means that will go forward relatively slow.

Then we're gonna delay for 1000 milliseconds one second and then we're going to say l servo dot right ah 100 Arciero dot right 100.