Hello everyone of steemit,
It has been a busy week. Long story short, the RC car is alive, and I am able to control it from my laptop, I am so happy I got it working, and it wasn't all that difficult, if you're familiar with sockets/networking in programming, you can pick this up pretty quick. Essentially you send high/low signals, using pi4j libraries, high signals being sent will move the RC car in forward/reverse/left/right, and low signals are essentially to stop the RC car. With arduino, its reversed, which is odd. But, hey, to each their own.
Like I said I promised to release my source code on github, and the source code provided is just basic, I still need to do some more code, but it works for now. Links will be provided along with resources I used on this project.
The java program is executable JAR file which can work on windows, and any linux distro that has java jdk/sdk installed. Android support will be available by next weeks blog entry.
While I was working on my RC car, and testing it for the first time, my controls were reversed, I used WASD format to move my rc car, and whenever I hit W it would go in reverse, and when I hit S it would go forward, etc etc.. I checked my code, pinouts and everything was fine, I am still confused why it was reversed, but I reversed the RPi GPIO pins to get it to work. I am very excited with this project, and I also came across another RC car at thrift store, I did quick check to the circuit board, and it almost looked like dead ringer to the current circuit board I was messing with, which wouldn't surprised me I heard those were pretty common in RC vehicles.
If anyone else is thinking of doing this, just google any data sheets on circuit board you're messing with, and see if you can find any info. I watched couple of videos about wifi RC, and this video was very informative, and it will help you get started if you're new.
Now, I dont have any videos of me test driving it, at the moment, that will be in a future blog, work has been crazy, and I have been tired. That is why the blog is being submitted 3 days late. If you have any questions please let me know in the comments, I will be more than happy to answer them.
Resources:
Source Code: https://github.com/AndyADD/WifiRCProject
Device - Raspberry pi model B REV 2
Libraries - http://pi4j.com/
Turning Raspberry point into a Access Point - https://learn.adafruit.com/setting-up-a-raspberry-pi-as-a-wifi-access-point/overview