Control your Arduino Rover using Firmata and Xbox One Controller

A few month ago I bought a little rover (controlled by an Arduino Uno) for a very good price. The kit was very complete: Car chassis, 2 Car Wheels, 2 DC Gear Motors, a UNO R3, an L298N Dual H-Bridge Motor Controller and several other components.

This rover is meant to be programmed for autonomous operation. Hence an ultrasonic sensor and a servo is also added in the kit. Also a nice Arduino sensor shield 5 is in the kit. Yes, it was a real bargain 😉

But my idea was to use both an Xbox One Controller and the Firmata protocol to drive this one by myself or one of my sons. And it works very well!

Here is a video of the final solution:

In this blog, I will show you how it’s done.

Custom servo usage in Firmata

If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And my biggest hammer for now is Firmata.

I was looking at an Ignite 2015 presentation, MOB324, where a kind of radar using a distance reader was demonstrated. And at the same time I was checking out the same usage of a distance reader and a servo as part of am Arduino controlled car.

So I tried to do the same using Firmata. And it’s pretty easy, with a little twist.

But first we look at the servo part using the Arduino Servo.h library.