Driving a car with a joystick through the Arduino Mega

Probably every car owner sometimes has a desire to control his car at a distance. For example, move to another parking spot, looking out from the balcony, or take it to the garage, without getting up from the sofa.

Students at Ohio State University showed a budget option on how to make an on-board computer on an Arduino Mega board. The machine is controlled from the joystick.

Four students Carter, Dave, Ryan and Shawn collected the D / U system partly from improvised means, during the 24-hour hackathon at the university. It was called MagiKarpet, because the control unit lies in the place of the rug.
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For example, plastic connections for fastening elements were blinded in an hour, boiling and softening polymorphic plastic (polymorphus).







For the project took the car Chevy Cobalt. The task was to control the gas pedals, brakes and the steering wheel directly from the gamepad. One linear actuator controls the iron "foot", which presses on the gas pedal.



The other drive pulls the cables attached to the steering wheel so that it turns 90º in each direction.







For more pleasure, the students mounted the camera on the trunk, which broadcasts to the monitor a picture of the movement of the car from the third person, as in a computer game.



During the work there were some difficulties. At first, the guys wanted to use the gamepad from the Xbox game console, but it was buggy, so I had to replace it with a homemade joystick.

The judges who took over the works of the hackathon participants categorically refused to allow the demonstration in the courtyard of the university (for security reasons), so that the control from the joystick was shown in a stationary version, lifting the car on a jack.



In the end, everything turned out perfectly, but the guys took only second place in the hackathon.