Heading out

So after running the car flat out and watching my children crash it into trees an parked cars, I decided it was far past time to get to work. I wanted to first address problems with steering from last year. I had a GPS module to tell me when to turn but I was using a rather crude delay to time the corning for the truck.

This year I got a compass! With the compass I should be able to get a heading to point the truck in the right direction. In the past I attempted to use the GPS modulehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif for this but had limited success. GPS modules need time to get locks and can take even more time it seems to establish that you are traveling in a specific direction. During last year's Autonomous Vehicle Competition at SparkFun I overheard several other teams having difficulty getting reliable data from GPS - either because of the weather (snow/rain) or because of weather proofing (plastic wrap, zip sandwich bags, tupperware, etc)

Instead I give you the HMC6352 for an instant heading. I wired up the HMC6352 to a development shield on my arduino and with some example code I was able to get reasonable values for where I pointed the little bugger. When I turned right the heading followed - turned left and numbers seemed to go in the right direction.

Yay!