Hacking a $9 Remote Control Car with Arduino

As somebody who is also learning electronics, I can also confirm that it is extremely satisfying to pull apart cheap RC cars and connect them to an Arduino.

For anybody who is interested (including the OP), there is plenty of good tutorials around. The one at [1] explains a similar process as discussed in this article, except it doesn't rely on a test point on the circuit. Instead, it just talks directly to the relevant pins on the transmitters chip. Apparently most toy cars use the same sending/receiving chip - the TX2/RX2 [2]. Indeed the one I took apart had this chip, and I can confirm that it is relatively straightforward to wire up the Arduino as in [1].

If you search around, there are also tutorials on doing similar things to the circuit on the car itself, rather than the transmitter. My goal is to create a real-life Mario Kart setup by doing the following:

* Hook Arduino up to the car.

* Allow regular control of the car from the transmitter, but let the Arduino override these and control the car directly too.

* Connect IR LED and IR Receiver to Arduino on the car.

* Allow cars to shoot each other (there is an additional "turbo" input/output on the RX2/TX2 chips which is rarely used, so should be able to make that an auxiliary input which means "fire".

* If the car gets shot by another, then the Arduino will brake the car for a period of time.

This is all coming along nicely so far, I have the Arduino's firing at each other using IR and detecting who hit them. I also have the transmitter being controlled by an Arduino and receiving input via the serial port from my laptop, so that you drive the car from a computer. The next step is to get the Arduino to control the car directly, and then to let the Arduino and the transmitter both control the car, with the Arduino taking priority if it chooses to.

If anybody is interested, I'll do a writeup when (if) it gets completed (enough).

[1] - http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-controls-cheap-RC-ca...

[2 (pdf)] - http://www.instructables.com/files/orig/FWW/CD13/GV525G0X/FW...

Besides blinking an LED, this was my first electronics project as well. I used the parallel port of a IBM PC XT to connect to the remote and turbo pascal to program it though. Port $387, baby.

It was 1991, I had many pimples and little popularity, but when the car moved by computer command, i felt like Thor the thunder god. Highly recommend.

I'm just going to shamelessly plug my project which previously featured on HN, where I did something similar and then added a camera on a smartphone to make the cheap RC car drive itself :-)

http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/

Great, I'm trying to do similar stuff and implement a Wi-Vi like system for tracking the car.

Wi-Vi: http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/index.html

I've got an RC car that will stop before it runs into walls. Arduinos are fun!

http://gilgamech.blogspot.com/

Pretty cool.