How to Remote Control the Rover

Sometimes it can be useful to be able to remote control your Micromelon Rover through difficult terrain or obstacles in order to see what the sensors see. This can help students design algorithms and programs that better use the different sensors the rover has.

In this guide, we’ll be going through how to use the ‘Rover View’ on the Micromelon Code Editor to allow you to remote control your rover, and get back useful sensor information from it.

To access the Rover View, first connect the rover to the computer via the Code Editor, then click the button ‘ROVER’ with the rover icon next to the robot name:

When clicked, this view should appear, showing you all the incoming information from the rover:

Keyboard Controls

Shown below is the keyboard layout of how the rover can be controlled.

When the servos are being controlled, ‘Decrease’ reduces the respective servo by 5 degrees. Repeatedly pressing ‘Decrease’ for a while will be the equivalent of setting the servo to -90 degrees in the code editor. When the rover view is initially opened, both servos are set to 90 degrees, but will only move to it once one of the servo buttons have been pressed.

Sensors

The Rover View shows a display called Sensor View when opened. This gives live information from all of the rover sensors which can be very useful for debugging and testing out how each sensor works. Shown below is a guide to the groups of sensor data:

To learn how each of the sensors work and what the values mean, head to the rover sensor information page through the link below!