wireless motor control

[darrenhuseby]

I am new to arduino and I am a pipe welder trying to use a gear motor to rotate parts as I weld them, I have a gear motor and a speed control that are working great but the speed needs to be adjusted while welding sometimes and for different diamter pipe and its hard to set a rheostat exactly the same every time, its also not practical to use a foot pedel as conditions are often muddy and nasty or to reach the rheostat while your hands are busy. The Ideal solution I envision would be voice command, go, stop, faster, slower, maybe even it could be set to a certain speed say 63 or 52 as an example. I have a speed control already , It has a rheostat with 3v across it. I was thinking about taking the rheostat out and replacing it with outputs from an arduino board, have a wireless voice command module to give the commands to the arduino, maybe a bluetooth headset under my hood ? open to any better ideas as well. I have made the led blink and done a few simple programs with the arduino then I get confused with anyting more advanced. I understand some basics about electricity and can wire and solder and build things but I am not an expert on arduino code by any means and need some help as to what products might be best to accomplish this and how to interface and program them. Please help if you can give any input it would be awesome ! Darren 970 216 4419