Hacking RC car to apply self-driving concept for car racing
For this project we bought an rc car. We had multiple options to solve the problem of controlling the vehicle from PC (Mac). We could:
- Follow multiple tutorials to create RC car controlled by Arduino. This would require to solve a problem of how to transmit the signal from the PC to the car (the first problem remains unsloved). We'd had to use either USB or wi-fi modules.
- Make a radio transmitter on PC. Most of the guides explain how to make a radio transmitter (but only for FM frequency) or using oscillator to find a frequency of the car and basically using brute force checking each and every value until car moves.
- The best thing is that RC car already has everything - car mechanics and radio transmitter. We only need to hack it. So we bought some pins and prototyping print-board for the POC.
This is our car. We chose to buy a mid-zise car with big enough weels, so it could handle hardware weight in the future:
Radio transmitter board. You can see that turns and moves forward/backward are handled by buttons on the board. So we needed to solder pins to button and power a board from a PC/controller:
How to control car digitally
Each pin from every button on the transmitter board must be connected to a ground in order to close a circuit so car moves or turns. We have 4 pins and they must be controlled from 4 different channels (so we can control all of them independently). Thus, we decided to get an Arduino controller to control 4 different pins. Here is what we got:
We used Arduino Uno Plus
All the source code is presented here