SparkFun Forums

[Larsey]

I'll be specific: I want to control my old RC-car with my phone over bluetooth. Im no electrical pro, so I need some help picking the right parts for my project.

To get a quick overview I have taken two pictures of the RC car:

Steering: http://bildr.no/view/1046523
Engine: http://bildr.no/view/1046524

With my multimeter I have done the following observations (at multimeters 200 VDC (i dont know what 200 means)):

engine gets -6 wile driving backwards, +6 for forwards, 0 for standing still
steering is the same as the engine but right and left
Now, over to my buying list, sparkfun seems the be a good choice:

1x DEV-10174 Arduino Uno Starter Kit
1x PTR-09835 Battery Holder (for the arduino)
2x ROB-08907 Motor Driver (one of the engine, one for the steering)
1x WRL-10938 BlueSMiRF HID

Am I missing something? Is it possible to control a RC car over bluetooth with a mobile phone? Come to think about it, the motor should have some kind of energysource?

Thanks in advance

[Comrad_Durandal]

200VDC means the setting on the voltmeter that will read up to 200V in DC. It means you are getting -6V when running the engine in reverse, +6V in forward - and no voltage flow idle. Servos are basically motors with some insane gearing to allow them to do work with their power. The big problem I can see is amperage draw - Arduinos usually max out at about 500mA across all of their outputs... if your RC car has a heavy draw motor - you could easily overload your microcontroller using it to directly drive things. Your best bet is to look into a motor drive shield or a shield used to control high-amperage draw devices like this.

Another thing to consider is that Bluetooth has a limited range, and that you'd have to write a control application to issue commands to the controller from the phone (and use any data returned to the phone by the microcontroller).