In April of 2022, I was admitted into the Robotics and Automation shop program at my high school. I was pumped to put my skills to work in the shop by designing and building fun electronics projects. This is the story of the RC car I built as my first project.
At the time, I was interested in RC cars, and I wanted to see what I could do with them. So I set out to build a remote control car. But not just any old RC car. I decided to stick a Raspberry Pi and a camera onto this car and allow control from anywhere in the world. How did this project come to fruition, and what did I learn from it? Remember – this was my very first working electronics project ever, so I learned quite a bit.
The Chassis
For the chassis, I used a Parallax RC car frame, as at the time I didn’t have the 3D printing skills to print my own. My first build of the car included a Parallax RC car frame, a USB battery pack, a Raspberry Pi Model 3, a camera, and some continuous rotation servos.
The Software
I wrote all of the code for the car in node.js, however, due to my poor documentation skills at the time, I did not save the code. I used a web-server hosted on the Raspberry Pi that would interface with the servos to allow movement. The RC car could tank turn both left and right, and move forwards and backwards. I used the camera mounted to the RC car to broadcast live video back to the person controlling the car. After I installed ngrok on the Raspberry Pi to allow anyone to connect and control the car, I was able to control the RC car from anywhere with an internet connection, or invite faraway friends to do so!
The Finished Product
In the end, this RC car was incredibly fun to build, and it managed to impress my Robotics and Automation teacher. I’m proud of this build. I know there are a lot of things I would do differently if I were to re-build this project today, but it was a great way to learn and test my skills at the time The RC car isn’t perfect, but I’m still proud of it as my first-ever attempt at an automation-based project. I learned a lot about web-servers, sockets, and programming micro-computers such as Raspberry Pis.
