Wireless Remote Controller RC Tank
My project is a wireless remote controlled RC tank. I control the RC tank with my PS2 controller. This RC tank is programmed through an Arduino using C++.
Engineer
Kai S.
Area of Interest
Electrical Engineering
School
Gateway High School
Grade
Rising Junior
For my final project I built a wireless remote controlled RC tank. The brain of the tank is an Arduino micro controller. An Arduino is a micro computer that you program to do what you want. I attached a Adafruit Shield onto it so it can get powered by a battery pack and portable charger, which can power the motors and the wireless device. An Adafruit Shield has more plugins so that I can run more motors, get power from multiple sources, and connect more outlets. The controller is connected to a wireless device. Through the wireless device I plugged in pins to the Arduino/shield tracker which act as power, buttons and analog. The analog pin makes it so that it gives a reading and an output. For example, if my controller was connected to the serial monitor, and I press up or triangle, than it would output up pressed, triangle pressed.
Once the Arduino receives messages from the controller, it feeds it to the motors. There are two motors and both are connected to the gear box. The gearbox changes the axis of the which the motors turn, speed, and torque. The higher your gear ratio is, the faster the speed, and the lower the gear ratio is, the faster the torque. This all depends on the sizes of the gears and the amount of teeth on each gear. For example, if gear one has 30 teeth and gear two has 10 teeth, than the speed of the motors will be three times faster. This is found by dividing the given ring(gear one) by the attached pinion(gear two). Gear one is two times bigger than gear two. If gear one rotates 360 degrees, than gear two will be already rotated 720 degrees. In my code under sections of PS2X code, I put motor codes. So under codes that lists pad up or pad left, I wrote code that will run motors. That way when I press left pad or up pad, the motors will move according to the buttons I press.
In the future I plan on adding some modification to my RC Tank. A few ideas are: mount a laser turret onto the tank or add compressed CO2 with BB bullets. My main objective is to mount something that shoots because in reality tanks shoot.
Asset Tracker
This is the Particle Electron GPS Tracker. Using the Particle IDE I can flash my code onto the cloud, and as an output it will return coordinates of GPS tracker. The Particle Electron is a micro-controller that is connected to the Particle Cloud. The micro-controller is attached to the the GPS tracker which the code can be flashed with the GPS tracker. The Electron and the GPS tracker is powered by a lithium battery and uses cellular data to connect to the cloud. When device is turned on, it has to locate the satellite first in order to give out the location. In my code I changed the refresh rate of the given coordinates to every thirty seconds. This means that every thirty seconds it will feed me the new location. The code that is flashed in the cloud then returns me the location in the form of longitude and latitude.
Minty Boost
For my starter project I built the Minty Boost. The Minty Boost is a USB charging device. It is powered by two double a batteries which produce three volts. The electrical current from the batteries flows to the PCB. The PCB consists an inductor. The inductor stores the electrical energy and turns into magnetic energy. Once the inductor stores enough energy, the magnetic energy switches the lever which releases the current in big quantities. So the output voltage is higher than 3 but the output current is fluctuating. The diode will direct the flow of the current. Then the current goes through the capacitor which smooths out the fluctuating flow of the current into a steady output of energy. Out the USB consists a steady flow of five volts which can charge anything with a USB outlet.
https://learn.adafruit.com/minty-boost/parts-list
