Projectile Firing RC Car
The idea for this project came during my senior year of college at UCSD. I wanted to showcase some of the Engineering knowledge I had gained in an innovative way while I still had access to the UCSD CNC laser cutter and workshop. I loved my M156A design class, which its main project used an Arduino microcontroller to control a mechanical system. As I I wanted to build upon what we had done in the class by creating or modifying some sort of Electro-mechanical system, RC devices caught my eye.
Some research online unveiled a few avenues where one could use an Arduino paired with a bluetooth board to send and receive commands from a phone. I figured if I could control the motion of an RC car then I could also create a system paired with the car to go a step further. After countless hours of banging my head against the wall, troubleshooting every electrical/software problem in the book, and trying to convince my colleagues that it would indeed work, it finally did. Now it was time to make an over the top video!