drift car

2 Articles

3D-Printed RC Drift Car Comes With Smoke Effects

July 25, 2024 by 7 Comments

Drift cars are cool, but they’re also expensive. If you don’t have money for endless tires, fuel, and engine rebuilds, you might like to get involved at the RC scale instead. [Max Imagination] has just the build to get you started.

The design uses 3D printing for the majority of the chassis. Rigidity is front of mind, as is creating the right  steering and suspension geometry for smooth, controllable drifts. The drivetrain is 3D-printed too, using plastic gears and universal-joint axles combined with off-the-shelf bearings. Steering is controlled via an off-the-shelf servo, with a brushless motor putting power down to all four wheels. While drifting at full scale is best achieved with rear-wheel-drive, it’s easier to control at the small scale with four driven wheels.

True to the DIY ethos, an Arduino-based RC system is used to drive the steering servo and motor speed controller, with a home-built pistol-grip controller. It also activates a small power supply which runs little humidifier modules, which turn water into a visible vapor for a fun smoke effect. It doesn’t really imitate tire smoke, since it disappears nearly the instant the car moves, but it’s still a neat effect.

It’s a neat build that makes a great starting point for your dive into RC. Meanwhile, if you’re more about speed than getting sideways, we’ve seen a homebrew RC car designed to that end as well. Video after the break. Continue reading “3D-Printed RC Drift Car Comes With Smoke Effects” →

Fly Like You Drive With This Flying RC Drift Car

May 26, 2023 by 9 Comments

So it’s 2023, and you really feel like we should have flying cars by now, right? Well, as long as you ignore the problem of scale presented by [Nick Rehm]’s flying RC drift car, we pretty much do.

At first glance, [Nick]’s latest build looks pretty much like your typical quadcopter. But the design has subtle differences that make it more like a car without wheels. The main difference is the pusher prop at the aft, which provides forward thrust without having to pitch the entire craft. Other subtle clues include the belly-mounted lidar and nose-mounted FPV camera, although those aren’t exactly unknown on standard UAVs.

The big giveaway, though, is the RC car-style remote used to fly the drone. Rather than use the standard two-joystick remote, [Nick] rejiggered his dRehmFlight open-source flight control software to make operating the drone less like flying and more like driving. The lidar is used to relieve the operator of the burden of altitude keeping by holding the drone at about a meter or so off the deck. And the video below shows it doing a really good job of it, for the most part — with anything as complicated as the multiple control loops needed to keep this thing in the air, it’s easy for a sudden input to confuse things.

We have to admit that [Nick]’s creation looks like a lot of fun to fly, or drive — whichever way you want to look at it. Either way, we like the simplification of the flight control system and translating the driving metaphor into flying — it seems like that’ll be something we need if we’re ever to have full-size flying cars.

Continue reading “Fly Like You Drive With This Flying RC Drift Car” →