Arduino RC Car

Once upon a time, I was interested in what results can happen if using a PC to control a radio control car? I imagined that a PC program can record/replay all the operations about a RC Car. And further more, the program can combine small sets of operational codes that may allow the RC car to do unusual things. For a human control, it is impossible to repeat the same control again and again. How about the PC control? The PC control definitely can repeat the same instructions again and again. PC control should be much better than a human can do. The problem is, how good the PC control can do this job? How good can a PC do every operation with the programed time duration and at the exactly right moment? Will the operation result much better than a human?

So, this project started.

This is the whole picture of this project. And the key points are:

Buy an analog controlled RC Car from the market
Use Arduino to accept commands (Host program) from PC then control the RC Car
Write a PC program (Client program) to handle user operations and send to Arduino

Claw Man

Claw Man is a claw machine simulation game online, where people can play the claw game, practice and test the swing claw skills, and attend Olympic Claw Competition to get the world rank.

The situation is, I have an Arduino board on my hand with some programming experience about Arduino IDE digital/analog pin control and motor control. And I have some programming experience about C++ console program. So, I should be able to figure out a way such that the user operations can be sent to Arduino, then Arduino can generate "some signal" to control the remote controller of a RC Car.

I imagine on the circuit board of a remote controller, since it is an analog control for the user, so it must has a potentiometer with a analog voltage that will be detected by a chip. Base on the voltage, the car can perform forward / backward and left / right turn. So the chip should base on the voltage to send out wireless signal to achieve remote control, and I don't need to worry about this part. I should check the right voltage for control and try to use the Arduino to generate the right voltage to the remote controller.

The advantage of using a PC to control the RC Car is, it is relative easy to use all the resources on the PC, such as it has a monitor be able to check the data, the disk can store and replay all kinds of user operations, and easy to do the programming.

So the RC Car is made for user to have fun with it and enjoy the feeling of remote control. Using a PC is for reliable automation, user can record and replay the control. Or, user can customize a whole control progress for a task, and optimize the operations as much as the user want.

So, this is how I started this project.