Autonomous RC Car (Lidar Used)
July 2019 - Present
Part One - Lidar
When I first received my XV11 Neato Lidar, everything looked fine. I thought it was in perfect condition. Since the motor and the lidar were separate systems, I thought it would be a great idea if I test the motor first then the lidar. So I went ahead and tried testing the motor. Power on. Nothing. Tested the battery voltage and tried again. Nothing. At this point, I knew the motor was faulty. I took the motor apart and looked inside. Surely, the positive and negative brushes were touching. I cleaned the brushes and put them back. Video on the right is my result. Mind you, on this video, only the motor was connected to my Raspberry Pi and was running on 3.3V.
Everything was going well until I got started on the software part of the project. Whenever I tried to read a message from the LIDAR, I would see gibberish. I thought the baud rate was wrong and I tried the following baud rates. 110, 300, 600, 1200, 2400, 4800, 9600, 14400, 19200, 38400, 57600, 115200, 128000 and 256000. Nothing changed. I thought it might hardware issue and checked. As I thought, it indeed was a power problem; lidar was not getting enough power. As you can see on the right, instead of 3.3V, the motor is getting 1.79V.
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