I recently bought a 6-wheeled RC car with no controller for dirt cheap. I have done some research, but all the projects I have found involve hacking the transmitter. I have found that the RC receiver runs at 49 MHz. And I am confident that I have found the RX2 on the circuit board. How would I go about making the Arduino transmit commands to the car, and what materials will I need? Thanks for your time.
You either need to find a transmitter to match the existing receiver or you need to replace the existing receiver with a receiver for which you have the matching transmitter.
Assuming you can't find a matching transmitter I would see if an ESP8266 WiFi module could be put in place of the existing receiver chip. This would give your car a WiFi connection. You might then be able to control it through a web page. You can program the ESP8266 through the Arduino IDE: http://arduino.esp8266.com/versions/1.6.5-947-g39819f0/doc/reference.html
That might be the best way to go. I was thinking about removing the circuit board entirely and adding an arduino so I can build on top of the car with a robot arm or wifi camera. That would be best to build it the way I want. Thanks for the input. You guys are awesome.
Usually a simple remote control vehicle will have a few transistor H-bridge (motor control) circuits driven directly from pins of the receiver chip. You can remove the chip and have the Arduino drive those pins instead. This will save you from having to add a motor control chip to your Arduino.
One thing to watch out for: the H-bridge circuits may not be protected against having the Pull High and Pull Low transistors of a half-bridge on at the same time. This causes a short across the battery and can fry the transistors.
That makes since. I try to always make sure I'm not giving something too much power. If I can't find a datasheet on the RC car, is there a way to determine how much resistance to use?
I wonder if it would be easier to program for wireless communication using a pair of NRF24 2.4GHz transceivers rather than WiFi ?
(I have not taken my NRFs or my ESP8266 out of their bags yet - if I do, I won't finish another project)
...R