[Upcycle It] Interactive Race Car Driver - The Checkered Flag

"What will you make?" asked the Intel Edison. The objective of the project was to upcycle an old RC car and a Furby to create an Interactive Race Car Driver using the Intel Edison and scrap or recycled components.

Car

One of the key features that attracted me to the car was that it had 4 screws located at the front and back. I knew those would make a good mounting point for a frame to which I could attach my components. The frame was printed using with recycled filament that used to be car dashboards. The screws came from old PCs and keyboards.

The middle of the car housed the RC module and a container for the original battery pack. I checked if the H-Bridge of the RC module could be reused on a simulator and then in reality. It was designed never to stop so would not work for my project. So that was removed and swapped with an off the shelf module. The middle of the car was cut down and rewired using old PC cables.
Another feature that appealed to me was the 4 wheel drive skid steer setup of the motors. However only 3 of my 4 wheels were working so I had to repair the gearbox. Which I did with some gears from the spares box.
To my frame I attached lights and bumpers, along with a battery box. The lights were upcycled too, a broken downlight was disassembled to extract the LEDs for the headlights. 3mm RED LEDs for brake lights were salvaged from a keyboard, theses have yet to be incorporated into the car.

I wanted the Edison to take pride of place so I styled that as the engine with the aid of some 3D printed parts, these were printed using recycled P.E.T. which used to be drink bottles.

To simplify testing and wiring I used the grove shield and connectors. I put my own sockets on the breakout boards for the motor and lights. The boards I used for the lights were upcycled from some scrapped protoshields with poor quality silk screen that AverageManVsPi sent me last year.  The wiring for these boards was also upcycled where possible using old telephone cables. The bumper was also 3D printed and fitted with microswitches. The switches came from a broken shredder. The car is powered from a phone powerbank which clips onto the back of the car with 3D printed clips. Unfortunately my 3D print broke before I finished printing all the parts but temporary parts have been made from wood.

All the 3D models can be found at: https://github.com/Workshopshed/UpcyclingDesignChallenge

Driver

The main donor component for the driver was a first generation Furby from the 1990s. Like the car this had it's H-Bridge swapped out with an off the shelf module. Also removed were the 2 chip on board modules that used to control the motion and sounds. These were replaced with wires that connected up to the Edison via some simple level shifters. The level shifters were made using more scrap protoshields and some transistors that most likely came from a radio.

The Furby's motion is driven from a series of cams. The position of those is sensed with a mechanical home switch and an optical sensor that pulses as the cam rotates. The LED for that sensor was replaced as it did not seem to be working. The output of the sensor went through some conditioning circuity to transistor to shift the signal level down to 1.8v for the Edison. The MCU was programmed to detect the pulses and count them.

To give the Furby a voice a USB audio card was plugged into the Edison. This was modified to have a micro USB connector. An amplifier module was added to drive the Furby's original speaker.

I got my daughter to record her best Furby impersonations and these were chopped into segments and copied to the Freddie board.

Upcycling summary table

Software

Right from the start I decided to standardise on NodeJS for the code. I also wanted to be able to control the car from a phone or tablet. I wrote a simple web UI that connected back to the Edison using MQTT over Sockets. This was secured using certificates.

To read the signals from the optical sensor, the Furby uses the Edison's MCU and reports that back to the control software allowing the position of the action cam to be known. The Furby also hooks into MQTT too and responds to events from the car.

Car and Driver

Car Demo

Car test using some simple nodeJS scripts.

Motion test

Light test

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[Upcycle It] Interactive Race Car Driver - The Checkered Flag

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Driver Demo

Coming Soon

Thanks

Firstly to my family for putting up with 10 weeks of my madness and for their help, feedback and motivation.

Thanks to Intel for the Edisons, sponsoring the challenge and providing a great set of tools, documentation and O/S images.
Element14 for hosting the challenge.
Fellow challenges for their suggestions and ideas.
Previous Furby hackers: Kelly Heaton, Chris Brown and Northwestern University Mechatronics Design Laboratory
Harry Fairhead for his excellent notes on life at 1.8v.
Thomas Stratford and Alan Barnet for identifying my mystery transistors.
Brian and Enrico who offered to print parts when my printer broke.
And to the Element14 and Twitter communities for their encouragement.