On a whim I decided to pick up an R/C truck to hack a bit with. For a number of reasons, I think I made a bad choice on the particular model, but one things got me a bit confused. The steering servo seems like it might be open loop? I’m guessing because there’s six leads coming out of it to the control board. Still one more than I might expect for motor power and a pot. Any idea how I track down a pinout?
Six leads? I have no idea.
The tracks looks very cool though. Did it come with those tracks?
probably SN96 cause it mentions it in the description, do u also know that those tracks are available for your quad/ATV/4 wheeler (watever you want to call it) i no its a little off topic but i have seen then rigged up before on a quad, and they are probably one of the coolest things i’ve ever seen
yea, tracks and wheels. The downsides I see to the thing as a target for a bot hack is it’s speed. It’s got quite a beefy motor that sucks up ridiculous amounts of power. I haven’t metered it yet, but it kills a 3300mah 7.2 in about 10minutes. With a proper speed controller and reasonable speeds, I’d hope this wouldn’t be so bad.
Another issue is that odometry is right out the window. The drive is 4 way differential and the steering is woefully underpowered. There is a very compliant spring attached to the output shaft of whatever is involved with the steering mechanism that seems designed for driving off small cliffs rather than precision. I can’t think of any way to sense movement on this thing other than accelerometers and gyros.
Hello Andy,
If you used only two of the track assemblies and integrated them with a third free wheel you could set up a base that would closely resemble Johnny 5’s base. Then steering would be done tank style rather than actually turning the whole track assembly.
Have you tried poking it with a mutimeter?
You can probably rule in or out a pot wire by measuring the resistance as you wiggle the steering output.
Heck, there’s only 36 possible combinations to try!
Seems to me someone had posted about hacking one of these things for parts on the board recently so I searched mattracks and came up with this lynxmotion.net/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=1017
If your 6 wires coming from the front are for the big goofy looking steering servo, then your 6 wires are as follows.
-Power ground
-Power live
-signal
-pot
-pot
-pot
I’ve tore a few of these toy servos apart before and they route the power/ground/signal (like on a real servo lead) plus the 3 pot wires back tot he main circuit board. Most servos have their own board inside, but most toys have the ESC and such for the servo intigrated into the main circuit board.