The Car
After working for quite some time I managed to control an r/c car with my laptop.
I had this car lying around in my cupboard and thought of doing something cool with it.
This is a cheap car with digital controller so they have simple push buttons for making the car work.they have four basic functions i.e FRONT, BACK, LEFT, RIGHT.
The Car's Transmitter
First thing was to modify the car's controller so that it could be connected to the computer.The buttons on my cars controller were simple micro push buttons that upon closing the circuit would connect the ground to the IC. After finding out the 0V contacts and active[4v] on the transmitter I soldered wires to them.
Now for connecting these wires to the laptop i needed a usb controller and a circuit. The first step was to purchase a usb controller, so I ordered the DIGIBEE from www.pc-control.co.uk and got it shipped to Nepal.
The digibee upon receving signal from the laptop would switch on one of it pins and would give +5V output.So first of all I needed to make a circuit to convert these signal to ground for these i used simple resistors (470 ohms) and BC547 transistors. These transistors in return ground the active points on the transmitter when they recieve a signal from the computer.
After the circuit was made and the usb board had come I connected them using male and female serial port connector [For easy removal and modification] and fitted the circuit into a nice box.
I also connected the controllers wires to another serial port connector and connected it to the circuit.
THE FINAL CONTROLLER BOX
I finally connected the whole circuit to my laptop and controlled it with my program through which I had tried controlling the car earlier.The car finally worked wirelessly.
I have programmed the car in visual basic 6.0. It is a simple program made using simple commands and a supporting dll.
I hope that I can do much more with this car.
Hope you liked the post.
