I was wondering if anyone could help with direction on making my idea a reality. I would like to wire the remote control of an RC car to the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi. I just do not know how to "make the connection" between the GPIOs on the Raspberry Pi and the remote's switches that drive the car. Ultimately, I was thinking that I could easily drive the Raspberry Pi around on this RC car, if I could activate it's switches.
To start, I only want to send one signal from one of the GPIO pins, and make one track go one direction (to make things easy). To help understand I've snapped some pictures and took a reading. The remote, after taking it apart looks like this on the top:
And this on the bottom:
When I have it on, and place the voltmeter on it, I get a reading of 4.36 volts:
So my thought is that I should have something between the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi, and the J1-J4 headers on the remote's board. The remote control itself uses a 9V battery. Should I use transistors to convert the 3.3V signals from the Raspberry Pi to try and match the 4.36V that is running across the remote's switches?
For what it's worth, it seems like more fun to control the remote of the unit, rather than the RC car itself. Also could be done with items like wall outlet remote controls: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812820011.
Thanks in advance for anyone's thoughts or help. You can see my previous work with the Raspberry Pi here to get an understanding of where I'm at with this type of stuff... its nothing ground breaking, but I've been enjoying it: http://karlherrick.com/dev/category/raspberry-pi/
