ECE 110/120 Honors Lab Section : Bluetooth Controlled Car

Introduction

For this semester, we are planning to build a remote control car. To make sure we can learn from the process while having fun, we decided to control the car using Bluetooth on our smartphones, and utilizing our knowledge learned in ECE 110 last semester and coding learned in ECE 120 this semester. We can learn more to work with Arduinos and digital logic. If we can successfully finish the project at the end of the lab, the car should run under commands sent from our phone along with other optional functions that we might add if necessary.

We stumbled upon this idea on YouTube. We thought it was a great opportunity for us to apply what we learned, and, since we are not familiar with coding to make the phone interact with Arduino, it was also a great opportunity for us to learn more about coding. There are a few great resources that we found listed at the end.

Design Details

First, we will tie the accelerometer and the Lilypad on our hand. When the accelerator detects a change, it will send a signal to the Lilipad, then the Lilipad utilizes the RF module transmitter and send the signal detected to the RF receiver on a breadboard on the car. The HT12D chip can decode the code on the breadboard and then control the motors on the car using the L293D motor controllers.

Since we need to receive the parts, especially the HT12D, to characterize the chips that deal with the RF signals. If the HT12D does not do what we expected, our backup plan is to use another arduino on the car to process the RF signal.

Since we know little about the actual process, we need to:

-Characterize sensors and modules (Accelerator)

-Learning how to send information from the sensor to arduino on the car via Bluetooth

-Learning how to control the motor using arduino

For parts, initially we need:

Possible Challenges

Characterizing Accelerometer. Learning to code by using Arduino language. We might even build a new car from ground up since the car we used in ECE 110 has limited functionality, so we might have some mechanical challenges.