Month: November 2012

A project that I’ve been playing around with for a while now that has just been replaced is my Bluetooth RC Car project.

This car was hacked together mostly from whatever scraps I could get hold of, such as the servo, distance sensor, and chassis. At the heart of the project is an Arduino, this is connected to the controlling device such as my PDA, which has an application coded to C#.

(Source Code [Visual Studio 2005 Project] http://tstableford.co.uk/downloads/bt_car_control.zip)

This allows me to control basic movement by dragging round the red circle, toggle the forward lights (the reverse ones come on automatically), manually change the servos position which the distance sensor is mounted to, or set it into auto mode.
Auto mode is a basic obstacle avoidance system, it drives forward fairly slowly while the servo scans 45 degrees to the left and right of the center while gathering distance measurements from the ultrasonic distance sensor. If it detects an object within 1 meter of the sensor it decides whether to turn left or right dependent on the servos location.

(Arduino Source-code http://users.aber.ac.uk/tis4/downloads/rc_car_control.zip)

I think this project has come to an end now, because the limited size there’s little else I can do. So I’ve started a new car that has a much larger chassis and battery pack, it has a real servo to control the steering, rather than a motor as pictured above it also has a Raspberry Pi, Wifi, and soon a webcam mounted on servos.