Monday 9 April 2012

Using the WowWee TriBot wheel encoders.

The TriBot base includes wheel encoders that provide feedback about the actual wheel rotation to the TriBot main chip.

These 3 wheel encoders are connected to the TriBot board with 3 thin 3-wire cables. They take 12V as input and output 12V. This means that you should convert the output to 5v before connecting it to the Arduino, which is a hassle.

However, if you disconnect them from the tribot and power them in 5V, they will work fine and output a nice Arduino-friendly 5V.

So the connection of each wheel encoder to an Arduino is pretty straightforward: ground to ground, +5 to Arduino +5 output, and the wheel encoder output to any Arduino pin (preferably one of the interrupt enabled pins), configured as input.

The wheel encoder connector pinout is:


 -----
 |   |
 |...|
-------
  123
  
1: Ground
2: Output
3: +5