Computer controlled RC Car..

vaultpurple

Here is the deal. I want to be able to control an RC car where I can program how fast I want it to accelerate and control the top speed and pace it goes at.

I did this in a class once with a boe bot from parallax where we used the kit and servo motors and basic stamp to tell it how fast to go and stuff.

My question is how could I do this with a RC car? Could I use one of the Parallax boards and wire it into the battery or controller to controll it? Or is there a way to make the servos get up fast enough on any of the equipment for the robots Parallax sells.

And if anyone else has any ideas that would be good too.

I essentially am going to have some kind of car on a track (so steering control is not really important). It needs to have a top speed of around 23mph (10mps) and be able to hold that pace for at least a minute (longer the better). This will be a pacing device so I would like to also be able to control the rate of acceleration and how fast it is going at each point in time.

Thanks for any help!

Duane Degn

A lot of RC cars use speed controllers are controlled by the same kind of pulses as used to control servos. So if you get a RC car that has a one these types of speed controllers, you shouldn't have trouble controlling its speed with a microcontroller.

Controlling the speed accurately might be a challenge. If the speed controller doesn't maintain a constant speed well, you might need some sort of feed back in order to adjust the pulse lengths sent to the speed controller. A common way to monitor speed is with an optical encoder.