-By Al Chandeck and Alfredo Garo

Introduction

In this project, we use our phone's IMU to control the RC car. The IMU data is sent via bluetooth and received by the mbed LPC1768 though Adafruit's Bluefruit LE module. The mbed the processes this data to control the speed of each motor individually to move as the user desires.

We have made the controls of the car very intuitive and user friendly. Tilt your phone forward, backward, left, or right and your car will go forward, backward, turn left, or right.

Furthermore, we have added a collision prevention sensor, two set of battery packs, and a micro LCD (uLCD) screen. You can find a sonar located in the front of the car. One easily-accessible battery pack located on the side of the car allows easy swap of batteries, and the other is used for back-up. Last but not least, a uLCD is located on top of the car allowing debug and status tracking while mbed is not connected to a computer's serial port.

List of Parts by Placement

Top of the Chassis

-1xmbed NXP LPC1768

-1xAdafruit Bluefruit LE UART (bluetooth module)1

-1xDual H-Bridge TB6612FNG[2]

-1xLCD uLCD-144-G2 (micro LCD screen)

Inside of the Chassis

-1xUltrasonic HC-SR04

-2xDC Motor (4.5V)

-2xDC Motor Encoder (Hall-effect sensors)

-4xAA Battery (8x optional)

Frame

-1xChassis

PinOut

Power Requirements

Snapshots of the RC Car

Side View

We can observe the left wheel, the DC motor driving it, and an encoder attached to the latter.

Front View

Highlight the sonar, which is used to avoid collision backing up.

Rear View

Top View

We can appreciate the components mounted on top of the breadboard. Namely, Dual H-Bridge TB6612FNG (bottom-right of the breadboard in red), Adafruit Bluefruit LE UART module (bottom-left, in blue), mbed LPC1768 (center in blue), LCD uLCD-144-G2 screen (top left). We can also appreciate abstract art of wires, but please disregard this.

Demo

Presentation

Source Code

References

Adafruit Bluefruit LE UAR (bluetooth module) https://os.mbed.com/users/4180_1/notebook/adafruit-bluefruit-le-uart-friend---bluetooth-low-/

Dual H-Bridge TB6612FNG && DC Motors https://os.mbed.com/cookbook/Motor

LCD uLCD-144-G2 https://os.mbed.com/users/4180_1/notebook/ulcd-144-g2-128-by-128-color-lcd/

Lidar VL53L0X https://os.mbed.com/users/4180_1/code/HelloWorld_VL53L0X_LPC1768/

Ultrasonic HC-SR04 https://os.mbed.com/users/prabhuvd/code/HCSR04/

DC Motor (4.5V) https://os.mbed.com/cookbook/Motor

PID Control && DC Motor Encoder (Hall-effect sensors) https://developer.mbed.org/users/electromotivated/notebook/wifi-pid-redbot-robot-webserver/

Chassis https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13301