Hi Guys - I have successfully controlled the robot remotely similarly to what you have described Moti. There are other posts on this forum which go into detail what I did, but I basically put a wire harness in the bot connected to the buttons on the back and hooked up an RF transceiver with the wires running to it. By sending an RF signal to the transceiver I was able to simulate pressing any button on the back of the robot.
I automated it by using x10 - I had an x10 program on my PC which I could control from my iPad or iPhone which triggered a signal to be sent to an RF transmitter - I had 4 transmitters - one for each button on the robot (on, off, charge, pause). The transmitter would send a signal to the robot, the transceiver picked it up, closed the loop on the wires simulating pressing the button and it worked great. I had a fairly good antenna on the robot to pick up the signals and I was able to control the robot anywhere in the yard.
I did put an outdoor camera close to the charging station so I could see what state the robot was in when it was charging (paused/unpaused). I was able to see this on my i-devices as well.
A couple of challenges with this:
1. The RF receiver required 12v power. There were two options - hook into the robot battery and put a device in the middle to regulate the voltage down to 12V or put in a separate batttery. i tried both and settled on trying to use the robot battery power since a manual recharge of a separate battery got to be a pain. The challenge was that I didn't have a cutoff mechanism to tell the RF receiver to turn off if the bot's lithium battery got too low. One time the robot got stuck and I wasn't there to put it back in the charging base and the RF pull on the batteries pulled the charge on the bot's battery below 24v and ruined it! Expensive mistake!!!!! Lithium batteries do not like going below a certain voltage!!
2. Figuring out what state the robot is in and did it actually receive the signal and execute it. I was able to see the robot when it was in the charging base but if I was away from home and wanted to control the bot through my phone (which did work - I could connect anywhere and submit x10 commands) but when it was out doing it's thing I couldn't track it as well. So ........
I also put a camera on the robot with the same setup. It was an 8v camera and I used a regulator to convert the power from the robot down to 8v. I was able to do the same thing as above and remotely turn the camera on and off from my i-devices. It actually worked very well - I took the plastic off of the light hole in front and mounted the camera out that hole. I could now see what the robot was doing easily.
The challenge here was the same - I had an extra receiver to control the camera which drew power and those regulators - they draw a small amount of power as well. So they just added to the battery rundown issue if the robot got stuck and couldn't recharge in time.
SO - the solution to these issues is either a voltage cutoff device of some type to disconnect all of these devices from the robot battery to avoid battery failure or a separate battery (non-lithium) which doesn't have the cutoff requirement and a way to recharge that battery easily with little to no manual intervention.
If someone has any great ideas about how to fix these challenges I am all ears. I would love to put this stuff back in operation because it is pretty cool. I still have the setup in place but I removed all of the extra devices from the robot because I didn't want to fry any more batteries
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Does anyone know of a small voltage cutoff device that could be used?
