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Author: mcollinge
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Episode 391: First Person View RC Car with PS1 Steering Wheel

First Person View RC Car with PS1 Steering Wheel

element14 presents  |  MAYER MAKES' VCP Profile |  Project Videos

 

 

 

Clem scored a broken Steering Wheel for the PlayStation 1 (yes the first one) at a flea market.Thankfully it is broken so he decided to turn it into an RC transmitter for his old Remote controlled Car! Learn how to use the Arduino MKR Wifi 1010 to make your own Transmitter and Receiver from scratch! It even supports FPV head tracking! What features would you like to add into the system? Tell us here in the discussion thread.

 

 

Extended cuts of the racing footage:

 

Bill of Materials

 

Product NameManufacturerQuantityBuy Kit
Arduino MKR wifi 1010ARDUINO2Buy Now
Linear Voltage RegulatorOn Semiconductor1Buy Now

 

 

 

Additional Parts:

 

Product Name/Description
RC Car  ( Cars used in the Episode: Hirobo Rock‘n Vega witch Toyota Levin body  / AMR Mini Scud with Mini Cooper Body)
The glue used to repair the plastic parts is Aprintapro Printaglue (designed to glue 3d printed parts)
Attachments:
FPVCarUDPHost.zip
FPVCarUDPReceiver.zip
Anonymous
  • in reply to kevinwhite195

    Hi, I haven't done any further work after this one and the RC-remote from scratch on this project.

    What you are trying to do sounds very trivial but it is not.

    the Advanced one:
    PPM signals are not the same as PWM  while it is straight forward to get an arduino to output aworking pwm signal for a servo (50khz, 0-255 duty cycle)
    all the different brands of rc transmitters and receivers take a different flavour of ppm or are very particular about what signal they want to get. While possible its abit more coding involved. plus you need to reverse engineer the protocoll your transmitter use to do any further mods on it.
    thats why i did the TX-RX from scratch with two arduinos and wifi modules that communicate over UDP.

    the protocoll is my own format so I can easily debug it.
    the simple one:

    if you just want to get the input from a potentiometer to be sent to a specific receiver you can just hack the matching tranxmitter with a few wires no coding required.
    Basically you are replacing one of the potis with another one that happens to be in the steering wheel (just make sure that the resistance values match). adjust sou transmitter settings, for endstiopps expos and so on and you are good to got.

     

    hope this gets you on the track to your own version!

  • Is this project still in development?

    I’m looking to make a simple version of this that just takes the potentiometer inputs and outputs a PPM signal that I could feed into other types of transmitters. Also, some kind of way to trim the steering wheel and pedal inputs.

    I imagine this would be very easy to do and could be done on a simpler/smaller board such as Arduino Nano but I have no programming experience.

  • in reply to zheng97hong

    In that case you may want to lok out around GameDev foruims as they usually have software to monitor USB (gamepad/keyboard/(mouse)) commands in realtime to measure latency and debug. so you might be able to just use one of those tools and repeat every command over another USB serial port to get it to the MKR Wifi

  • in reply to mayermakes

    Thanks for the reply and advise, the project I am working right is involve game engine so I think I will stick to the USB

  • in reply to zheng97hong

    yes,there is.

    I suppose they are USB devices, If so you can pipelione the commands over the pc to an Arduino also connected  per usb.
    this would need soem custo mcode running on the PC, but you might already find some code that reads out usb data form a steering wheel.

     

    the other version is to read the Wheels data directly either liek I did in the video or using a USB host shield and reverse engineer the protocoll (there might be a library already for some wheels)

    If you want to be quick I'd suggest doing like I did in the video, but if you want to keep the wheel unchanged, there is more work involved.

  • I am now doing a similar project, however the steering wheel, paddle and break is connect to pc. Is there any chance to send the signal from pc to wifi 1010?

  • in reply to lumo

    HI, glad you liked the project!
    the range is the same as most Wifi routers, so I got about 100m reliably (didn't test farther than across the street.
    you can easily extend it with ANY wifi repeater, router or just a homemade esp8266 repeater beacon.

     

    for your engine driven RC car you will find a ton of ressources here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUMQpCAvR-4&list=PLTSKzPo6hevfORlh-EATocpkpTFqLQ8Dr

    Jhonny Q90 is working on a similar project for a long time now and he is near completion.

     

    I'm currently working on a follow up project, so stay tuned and point your RC friends to element14.com/presents.

  • how far will the RC work? (outdoor) ? or better go with a PPM RC control? (lot of switches)

    i am not into mechatronics yet - but i am a professional software developer.

    I'd like to create a rc car with real engine and (hopefully) full set of lights from scratch. (hey, everybody can buy such a thing ;-) )


  • in reply to mayermakes

    I'll be taking a close look at it soon. I think I can contribute a lot to this project, as I've built my own design a couple of years ago and it's loaded with features. I've recently purchased a couple of u-blox ZED-F9P modules, they're accurate to less than 1 cm, so I'm planning on converting one of my racing RC cars to an autonomous race car based on AI Let me know what you think.