Over the years we’ve noticed that there is a subset of hackers out there who like to turn real life vehicles into remote controlled cars. These vehicles are generally destroyed in short order, either by taking ridiculous jumps, or just smashing them into stuff until there’s nothing left. In truth that’s probably what most of us would do if we had access to a full size RC car, so no complaints there.
As a rule, the donor vehicles for these conversions are usually older and cheap. That only makes sense, why spend a lot of money on a vehicle you intend on destroying? But even still, the RC conversion [William Foster] has recently completed may take the cake. We don’t know how much of the “antiquing” of his donor vehicle was intentionally done, but on the whole, the thing looks like it got dragged from the bottom of a lake somewhere. Presumably, he got a great deal on it.
The video posted to YouTube is primarily about [William] driving his creation around (sometimes from the back seat, no less), but towards the second half of the video there’s a quick rundown on the hardware used to make this pile of rust move.
A standard RC transmitter and receiver combination are used to control a pair of Arduinos mounted in the center console, which are in turn hooked up to external stepper drivers. The wheel is turned via a chain and sprocket arrangement, and the pedals are pushed with homebrew contraptions that look like they are made from lead screws intended for 3D printers.
All in all, it appears [William] has cooked up a fairly responsive control system with commodity hardware you could get on Amazon or eBay. Not sure we’d be backseat driving this thing personally, but to each their own.
We recently covered a Jeep that got a similar remote control upgrade, but these super-sized remote controlled vehicle builds are not just limited to the ground either.
Wonder how long it’s going to take until someone uses an R/C vehicle to do bad things (vehicle bomb/”Carmagedon IRL” or ther “nice” possibilities)…
Sadly, this has already been done on multiple levels… See the “drones” being developed and used by various armies or even some terrorists that strap the steering wheel and put a brick on the gas pedal.
On the other hand, a R/C demolition derby must be plenty of fun.
formula 1 racing has many restrictions for safety so it is somewhat stagnant. if there was a class of rc races then we might see technological progress.
I would watch formula E if they made it RC. Regular formula E is just not interesting.
Been done already, isis use this technique regularly
Cool home made RC toy, Hope he’s got some kind of ‘out of range’ kill switch where the car stops if out of radio transmitter range…
Perhaps he has a “penultimate resort” kill system built into his RC rig. Either way I think I see the “last resort” kill-switches in the background of the picture. We also call them trees!
The pedal controls seem to be open loop, likely counting steps instead of having an encoder. Was HAD able to get more build details beyond the video?
yeah it’s open loop, no encoders or end stops. luckily is never missed any steps (not enough to be a problem anyway).
if the vehicle wasn’t moving forward some times the steering motor would skip a few if you turned it full lock.
If only I had the land it would be RC car demolition derby time.
And every few laps, the cars have to parallel park :)
There should definitely be full scale RC car competitions!
It’s all about the cost… you’d need big sponsors to get any reasonable amount of competitors…
Buy everything from junk yards and don’t try to make it street legal. It’s not the cheapest but there are certainly more expensive hobbies.