Now why would you do THAT?

Life is much easier when you can see what's going on Sometimes I think these machines are getting a little too autonomous for my liking... Right now, Auric is being a downright pain the in the rear.  It just seems to be uncooperative. It all started when I observed that the directional control was erratic.  Given that the steering process is a stream of adjustments based on image processing, it is normal that there will usually be a mismatch in the speeds of the motors on each side.  But when the camera is shown a static image of a receding path I would expect it to steer more or less straight, or to make only small adjustments.  This however, was not the case. More digging hinted that not all of the commands sent from the main controller to the motor controller were being processed.  This boiled down to one of three possibilities: The main controller was not sending the commands; The motor controller was not receiving all the commands being sent; or The motor co

Looks like something an evil genius should have, right? In my last update, I mentioned that the "Auric"* chassis was being used as part of my self-driving experiment.  Now it's time to unveil it properly. Auric is a T-900 tank chassis made by SZ-Doit .  It's not cheap, but you get a lot for your money: The chassis itself, in a choice of anodising colours Twenty (20) idler wheels Four driven wheels Plastic track Bearings Motors (9V with Hall-Effect sensors, or 12V without) 16550 Battery Holder (no batteries) Screws, Nuts. Washers Allen keys The only problem is that there are no instructions supplied.  SZ-Doit have a Wiki on GitHub, but for the most part you are referring to photographs of the finished product in order to assemble the machine. Also available is a motor shield which is used with a NodeMCU module.  Since this was featured in the company's build I added one of those as well. Auric is on YouTube now.  Click here to view