External power supply in Arduinoculus

[Sellec]

Is there any way to include external power storage to arduinoculus?

[Sellec]

I tried to plug in 9V battery (http://www.camelion.com/primary/blue/blue_6f22.html) but it has no effect - arduinoculus microcontroller starts with this battery, but motors and servo does not work.

i plug in through 1 and 5 pin (5V and GND) in usb cable

[XaxxonColin]

9V should work, you say you plugged in through the USB cable pins? Or did you plug into the pin headers in the ArduinOculus board? (headers are located lower center of this pic: http://www.xaxxon.com/images/arduinoculus_labelled_big.gif)

[XaxxonColin]

Actually, 9V might be too much for the Atmega368 on the ArduinOculus  board  - I've used 6xAA tray with rechargeable batteries, which are around 1.2V each (7.2V total); that worked, and gave the bot a bit of a boost

[Sellec]

through the usb cable pins - see attached file. 

>>Or did you plug into the pin headers

you mean GND and 5V pin? But there are OUTPUT pins, did they accept input voltage?

[XaxxonColin]

try plugging 6xAA 1.2~1.3V rechargeables into 5V and ground headers on the board, and USB cable into your laptop as normal -- 9V is probably a bit too much, risks damaging logic circuits in the atmega328 chip

[Sellec]

what power parameters is needed from batteries? voltage 5-7V? And what about current?

[Sellec]

my problem is that im trying to connect ardunoculus and Arduino UNO through SoftwareSerial lib. Arduino UNO has Ihaos RF2400 module connected - it gives me a way to communicate with platform without netbook. UNO receives commands from PC and sends some of them to Arduinoculus (only oculus commands like F, V, Y and others). It also send some information from additional sensors to PC and send commans to additional servo controllers.

So, i have a problem - i need an external battery pack with over 7V voltage to supply a UNO, to supply an pololu maestro controller, to supply arduinoculus.

[XaxxonColin]

Greater than 7V is definitely too much for the chip on ArduinOculus -- but you can power the the Arduino Uno with up to 12V through its DC jack, and then use the 5V-out on the Uno, to power the ArduinOculus.

There is another software-only method, if you still have a netbook in the frame, connecting to the ArduinOculus via USB: use a script on your external PC to make a socket connection to the Oculus java app and send higher level commands like 'move foward', 'move stop', 'move right', 'dock undock', etc. (sorry but documentation on this is still sparse)