The motor controllers have an output that produces 30 pulses per rotation. This signal will be used by the host computer to form a first estimate of how fast the robot is moving. Since a threaded vehicle turns by sliding over the ground, this signal will not be very exact, but it will still be useful. The signal will be used to produce an interrupt on one of the inputs of the Arduino for each pulse. To see what the signal looked like, I hooked up the output to an oscilloscope and the result is shown in the figure below.
It is clear from the picture that the signal is very noisy since the oscilloscope is not able to measure its frequency. There is also a number of overlapping pulses shown to the right. Because of this the manufacturer recommends filtering the signal using the small circuit below.
I have not yet tested this, but hopefully this will result in a signal that is clean enough to use as input for the microcontroller.
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