RC Car with Tilt Controls

C++
3D Printing
Arduino
PCB
Enclosure
Accelerometer
Spring 2025

Buckle Up! This project developed a remote-controlled (RC) car that uses an MPU6050 accelerometer/gyroscope for tilt controls, offering a unique driving experience. The controller is a wireless handheld device shaped like a cube. The RC car is able to accurately respond to tilts of the cube, and is built with an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor module to detect obstacles directly ahead of the vehicle and brake to avoid head-on collisions. In addition, this project is able to respond to these near-accidents through pre-recorded voice lines. The controller is built with a switch to go between the previously described tilt controls and a standard dpad contol mode. The standard dpad control mode, while more limited in steering options and speeds, can be selected by user's who have difficulties with the tilt-controls option. Along the way our team had to overcome significant challenges. Namely, we had to figure out how to get the mechanical components working with very limited background in mechanical engineering, we had to carefully balance how long our code would hold onto particular commands to ensure that the RC car could drive smoothly with as little controller-to-car delay as possible, and we had to figure out how to design and implement RF communication as we opted to not use the on board communication options which the ESP32 is built with. This team developed this RC car from the ground up, both desiging the PCBs and 3D printing both the car chassis and controller case. Our team worked hard to both design and build this project, and we are proud of the final product which we ended up making.

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Artifacts

Name Description
Project Documentation The project documentation contains our project's overview, top level and black box diagrams, block validations, project closings, and artifacts.   Download
Controller Code Code that was programmed onto the ESP32 on the controller subsystem   Link
Car Code Code that was programmed onto the ESP32 on the car subsystem   Link
Car KiCad The car's schematic and PCB layout can be found here   Link
Controller KiCad The controller's schematic and PCB layout can be found here   Link
Car Subsystem 3D Chassis STL file containing the 3D printed chassis of the car   Link
Controller Subsystem 3D Enclosure STL file containing the 3D printed enclosure of the controller   Link
Project Poster Our team's poster for our project for the Spring 2025 Engineering Expo   Download
Executive Summary The up-to-date executive summary for our project   Download
Project Summary Video Video summarizing project including commentary on accomplishments   Link
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