What if your new car is designed to be operated by your smartphone or tablet, where you can control the speed of car within the vicinity of 10m and has certain specifications like lights and horn sound and contains battery level icon. Sounds fascinating! Well, this project by ardumotive is nigh to the expectations, where a simple RC is transformed to an Arduino Bluetooth controlled car and is controllable by your Android device, smartphone or tablet. 

 

 

The project requires certain materials including Arduino Uno board, L293D motor driver, HC-06 Bluetooth module and an RC Car that can fit all the materials. Further, you may also require 1M & 100K resistor for battery level, LEDs, speaker/buzzer for horn sound and for power, you can utilize the existing batteries of RC car, or substitute them with a LiOn rechargeable battery pack.

 

The existing RC circuit is replaced with a better version i.e. one from the Arduino Uno, you can start building from the beginning. Make sure that you find the polarity of 2 c motors in one battery of AA 1.5V. The positive polarity cable will move the car forward for motor movement or back side while for the direction motor or front side, the positive polarity cable will move the wheels left.

 

You can build the circuit on a trial basis using a small breadboard first to confirm all connections as it is essential to connect the State pin of HC-06 with the Arduino pin 2. 

 

 

A big RC car will require more power and therefore you should use L298 module board as L293D motor driver can only give max 0.5A per channel and is overheated in a while. While L298 module board is bigger L293D that can give 1A per channel and also has a heat sink. The code for this project is embedded using Codebender. You can download the Codebender plugin to click on the ‘Run on Arduino’ button for programming your Arduino with this sketch and for preparing your Arduino board. Go through the code for better understanding of its working module and then upload it to your Arduino Uno board.

 

The board is programmed after the RX & TX pins of Bluetooth module is disconnected and your new Bluetooth car is controlled by the android application, which you have to download and install. For details about the android application, codes and also to watch a video for this automated car, go through the following link.