Remote Control Jeep Community Service Project – Part 1

I recently worked on a community service project with my robotics team to convert a small electric car (the kind that kids can use to drive around their yard) to become remote control so that a disabled child’s parents could drive him/her around their yard. My job was to program the car to make it work. This is the story of how I got from never having programmed an Arduino to programming an electric car to make it remote control, and have safety features. But first, let’s start at the beginning.

The computer I was given to program was an Arduino, a micro controller that is commonly used in projects that need to control motors; such as a robot, or in my case, a small electric car. The Arduino uses its own programming language that is largely based in c++. The problem was, I had never used c++ before.

Starting was the most difficult part, and by starting I mean being able to connect the Arduino to my computer so I could begin programming it was difficult. It took quite a while before I was able to figure out how to connect to the Arduino, but with some help, and a lot of time, I was able to figure it out.

The next part was finding something to start from. I had absolultely no idea where to begin, and as far as I knew, there was no way to connect anything to the Arduino wirelessly (which is a problem when you’re trying to make something remote control). Luckily, I was given a link to a website that had instructions and code on how to connect an xbox controller to an Arduino wirelessly. The website gave me a link to an xbox controller library (a bunch of pre-made code you can just download instead of having to type out) that I could download.

From there, I downloaded the library and loaded up the example code I was given. Right off the bat, I was able to connect the xbox controller to the Arduino and print out the inputs from it to the screen, without having to type any code. Unfortunately, It didn’t really do anything it needed to, other than read input from the controller. But, it was a good start, and at least I had something to start from.

The next part was going to be having to figure out how to control a motor from the Arduino, and it wasn’t going to be easy.

Continue reading in part 2 here.