I have been given a 2WD, four wheel chassis to automate. The chassis is from an RC race car and has a big motor for the rear wheels and a small motor for the front wheels. It has a geared steering mechanism in place but the problem is that I have no idea how to determine what the wires sticking out of the front are for! That is, how the steering machanism works.
There are 7 wires coming from the front part, two of which are clearly connected to the small motor while for the rest: well your guess is as good as mine!
Does anyone have any experiance in this department!
I’m assuming this is an off the shelf R/c Car. Most “toy” cars have a steering servo in the front. The wires all go back tot he control board where the servo circuits are.
Most often there are 5 wires. 2 for the motor and 3 for the potentiometer (senses the position). I’m not sure what the other wires would be for.
I agree with Evo… the little motor in the front is for steering, and all the electronics are probably integrated on one little board.
What type of car is it? And why this particular car to automate? It honestly doesn’t sound like a great autonomous platform (unless you are making an autonomous race car, which would be cool 8) ).
Yes i’m making an autonomous race car using a Silverlit RC 1:16 Ferrari F430 model car chassis! I’ll try and post the pictures of the chassis tomorrow, however there is not much to it except for the fact that I have 7 wires sticking out of the front steering compartment. I have discoverd that 2 of the wires (the ones connected to the motor) are for turning left and right, this can be done by reversing the polarity, which is similar to driving back and forward for the rear motor!
Evo, do you have any idea how I would go about determining the three potentiometer wires! Again I’ll post the pictures so you can see the colour codes of the wires!
I don’t mean to be discouraging, but I’ve played around with cars like this before, and it never ends well. They just aren’t very robust. For one thing, the steering mechanism never lasts very long.
If you’re not expecting to crash it then you might be ok. Otherwise, I’d recommend trying to find a way to get a decent micro servo and servo saver in there. I know there are 1/18 scale servo savers. It will be a lot more reliable if you can.
Even if you know which wires go to the pot you are still going to need a control solution. The easiest way would be to buy a servo and remove the control board from it. Hoever I agree with evo and a-bot that converting it to use a standard servo will give you the best result.
