Category: RC

Waterproofed RC car

Today I finally got around to buy me some Plasti Dip that is perfect for waterproofing electricity. A bit expensive since I only used a 1/100th of the bottle. Still, I think it went rather well. Had a try in the icy snow outside my apartment and it went very well. Was with an old battery, so didn’t get to drive that long, but tomorrow I’ll ride some more. As I write, the RC car is upside down in the shower to try of. Hopefully the waterproofing is good enough so no water will ruin the electricity. Guess the only way to find out is to drive some more. Anywho, you can see some images underneath on how I did the proofing. Nothing special, I followed the guide I found. I went for ballooning the servo as it seemed as the simplest solution.

Drifting RC

I’ve finally bought the stuff I need to waterproof my RC car. So we’ll you wait for a post on that you can enjoy me drifting with my other RC car that I bought the new engine for. After I was done driving I found out that the plastic I used to keep the engine at bay had started melting. So I need to find some metal I can use instead. Or maybe more expensive and better plastic.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJlDlIvBWx0

Waterproofing my RC car

As mention in the previous post I bought a new RC car. While I was at the store I was allowed to try one of the car they had display. It was a 1/16 I think and it was waterproof so we where driving outside in the snow. One word, “awesome”.

Sadly the car I ended up buying isn’t waterproof, but hey, ended up paying less then half of what the other car cost. So the question now is, how can I make my car waterproof?

So I started to Google it and some of the top tips where; “buy waterproof parts”! Whaaat? That is not helping at all! Of course I know that the easiest (maybe the best) option is to buy waterproof parts, but thats just silly. It’s not helping me waterproof my car by buying new parts. Or at least not in the way I want to do it. Some people are to pedantic (right use of the word?). “Anywho”, what I wanted to do was to use the parts I have and just *poof* waterproof. Luckily I found this guide to help me.

Before reading, this is strictly my thoughts about waterproofing! Also, when I’m talking waterproofing, I’m not talking about driving your car underwater. I’m aiming to get car to handle snow. There, now you can continue.

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New RC-car!

Yesterday I visited my favorite RC-store SamiRC. I’m not experienced in the file of RC cars, but I like SamiRC, because they believe or at least help me out with my ideas. When I first started to think I should get my old RC car up and running I visited Smallsize to hear if they had any tips or ideas to how I could get my nitro car going again. Not much help there, and they had no faith in switching the nitro engine with an el-engine. In my head I was all “What?! There is no reason it should not work in theory. All the wheels need are something that make them spin!”. So I quickly left Smallsize. So I went to the internet to search for other stores in Oslo who maybe could help. Luckily SamiRC was there and they even helped me find the right gear I needed for my el-engine. “Anywho”, this was all last year. Now back to this weekend. I wanted to pick up my old RC car again and this time get it to work properly. So I got in contact with SamiRC again and asked if they had some all steelcage engines and ESC for a good price. They of course did and asked me to bring my car up so they could see what I was working with.

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RC & AI

Not much time to blog personally lately, mostly because I’m a bit lazy. Plus I’m writing on my master thesis, so I feel that I write enough.

“Anywho”, I have an RC car I want to modify in some way. I have changed it gasoline engine to be electric (not that hard, just change the two engines and get the right gear(s)), but what more can I do? I’ve been thinking about making it drive by it self (hence the Artificial Intelligence in the title), but is that any fun? Of course it would be a challenging and interesting coding job, but fun with RC cars is to drive them your self. So what can I do? I googled it a bit, and found these cool project.

HackedGadgets: Use the motor from a drill instead of a “proper” RC car engine. I’m going to try this this weekend. Since I have a spare drill laying around, and a spare RC car (had to get the electric engine from somewhere). Just need another set of batteries, but they aren’t that expensive.

JBProjects: Make a programmable RC car. This is similar to how you program a Lego MindStorm robot. Probably not going to do this on my big RC car, but I have a small one which is kinda broken with no projects going on. So with a h-bridge and an Xbee or something similar, this should be easy to get up and going. Guess the main challenge is to understand how fast it can go, and get it to turn properly :\ We’ll see later when I get time to build this. Plus I need to buy some wireless communication parts.

RCArduino: What about adding traction control or speedometer to the RC car? Both of these could be really fun to try out.

One project I have thought up my self it to make more crash proof. I’m not that a great driver of RC cars so sometimes I crash, but what if I could make the car handle better, or at least withstand the crashes? Some sort of rollcage. With some solenoid I could make it fill over like in the movies. That would be pretty cool.

Or another project would be just to add some cool lights underneath it, and maybe add movable shocks.

Any other ideas?