Pololu's Wixel + Arbotix Commander V2

[Gertlex]

For a project I just started, the Wixel MCU from Pololu seems to be sufficient for what I need (namely: 1 UART for Dynamixel servos, and a wireless serial connection).

I figured I'd use my Arbotix Commander for the controller. Since the Wixel's use some custom hardware wireless communication method, I need two of them (and I bought two of them for $20 total on Black Friday); one on the bot, and one to forwards the commands from the Arbotix.

I used some of the spare connections on the Seeeduino that is part of the Arbotix Commander V2, wired these to some female headers on a chunk of perf board, and stuck stuff together with double sided foam tape.

I first verified that the Wixel forwards the Arbotix Commander signals with the USB-to-Serial App that Pololu provides. And I've now succeeded with using the Wireless Serial App on both Wixels so that Arbotix Commander signals are sent to a PuTTY terminal on my computer. Not to be a shill, but that was easier to set up than any MCU + Xbee configuration I've seen.

And pictures: (Click to embiggen)

[Gertlex]

A modified app for the Wixel now compiles with the Commander code included. This is useful for the Wixel that is listening to the one plugged into the Commander.

Non-clean code can be found in my fork of the wixel-sdk repository. All I've done is copy the code I used for Numa + Commander, and comment out stuff I'm not using, and re-arrange .h/.c files a bit. The relevant app is in apps/wireless_serial_twitch. https://github.com/erelson/wixel-sdk

Had to skip the UART's buffer flushing after each complete Commander packet since there doesn't appear to be a comparable function in the Wixel libraries. (If I'm feeling like it, I might ask on the Pololu forums at some point...)