I picked up a couple of these RC cars at WalMart the other day and I knew I had to get them. At $6 a piece the were a total steal!
I set aside a day with
Sam Amin to do a teardown (my first!).
The cars each had a controller that turns left/right and drives forward/reverse, so at the least inside was a four channel receiver with a decent toy motor and some sort of turning mechanism- for only 6 bucks!
After four Phillips screws, the cover slides off.
The antenna still conncets the two though, so it also has to be unscrewed
Inside we see the the turning system among other things- Inside the black box are a couple of gears responsible for turning the front wheels. Once they turn all the way to the left (or right), the case provides enough load on the motor that it stops trying to spin and instead the current passes through a capacitor that's put in parallel with the motor. You can see the capacitor on the motor assembly on the right, which has the feature presumably with the anticipation that people will be driving head on into the walls.
What's really nice about this circuit is the clearly labeled board. The pins read Vcc, GND, M1-1, M1-2 (For the drive motor's +/-), M2-1, and M2-2 (For the turning motor's +/-). This should work nicely for any circuit you want to control remotely. The cars work on 27 MHz and 49 MHz, and like I mentioned before, the controller can do forward/reverse and left/right, so, with some diodes, you could control 4 on/off devices.
I picked up a couple of these RC cars at WalMart the other day and I knew I had to get them. At $6 a piece the were a total steal!
