Make Robot-Wifi-part5

Putting it All Together

Only the base of the RC car was used. All decorative and non-functional parts were stripped off. The camera was mounted to the front with only a small modification to the mounting hardware that came with the camera. The circuit boards were bolted to the sides of the front part of the car using plastic nuts and bolts to avoid conductivity issues.

The PIC controller board was also bolted securely to the side of the car. A number of holes were drilled to allow for routing the wires. All wires were intentionally made longer than required so that the pieces could be easily moved around before they were bolted in permanently. After all of the pieces were secured, all of the slack in the wires was collected and zip-tied (see pic in Power section above). There were a lot of wires. Probably around 30 that needed to be routed to/from the front and back of the car, not including the Ethernet cable.

All of the power circuits were housed in the project box on the back of the car, with the exception of the LT1083 7.5A Regulator which is on the bottom of the car. I didn't put it in the project box because it was a late addition to the project (after blowing a board earlier), so it was the easiest place to add it. An LED on the back of the box glows red while the router is booting up. When the router sends an 'alive' message to the microcontroller, the LED turns green and I know that I'll be able to connect with the VB client application. This LED was very helpful when debugging.

All of the electronics were prototyped on a breadboard before being soldered and installed in the car. The batteries were secured using hot-glue and zip-ties. The router was a bit too wide to sit on the car without some extra modifications. I added a couple pieces of plexiglass to make the RC car base wider.

Future [Possible] Additions
There are a couple things I think would be fun to add:
Headlights, just super-bright LEDs. They would be very easy to add to the microcontroller circuit.
Current Sensor that could relay back how much current the car was using and display it in the VB app. The microcontroller could read the sensor and send back the data.