THE REDROID PROJECT

In order to not completely destroy the all terrain Tyco vehicle, I decided to start prototyping the ground droid using a 6 dollar RC car from Walmart. I had two goals for the weekend: 1. To obtain GPS data wirelessly from the ground droid back to my local computer. 2. To gain control over the ground droid via the computer.

I did manage to obtain GPS data wirelessly using a Parallax GPS module and a Bluetooth Arduino! Unfortunately, I ran into problems when I tried to use the Bluetooth Arduino for both GPS data and control of the vehicle. In order to fix this, I decided to use a separate non-bluetooth Arduino to control the car.

In order to control the vehicle, I opened up the remote control for the car, and soldered wires onto the contacts of the control button. I then used the digital outs to feed power to the buttons. It almost works, but multiple controls often fire at once, causing an unpredictable motion. I believe incorporating some transistors may solve this problem. For now, the motion is random!

Here are some pics:

Successfully pulling data from parallax GPS module to Arduino!

Successfully receiving canary environmental data via hyperterminal.