Well.
I took apart a cheap RC car. Bought a soldering station to desolder the wires from the motor control board. Then got a motor controller board (an L298N, a big old chip for controlling 9-35V motors with 2A current draw -- not a good match for 3V 2A Tamiya FA-130 motors in the RC car), wired the motors to it, and the control inputs to the Raspberry Pi GPIOs.
Add some WebSockets and an Intel RealSense camera I had in a desk drawer and hey FPV web controlled car that sees in the dark with a funky structured light IR pattern. (The Intel camera is .. not really the right thing for this, it's more of a mini Kinect and outputs only 480x270 video over the RPi's USB 2 bus. And apparently Z16 depth data as well, but I haven't managed to read that out.) Getting the video streaming low-latency enough to use for driving was a big hassle.
Experimented with powering the car from the usual 5 AA batteries, then the same USB power bank that's powering the RPi (welcome to current spike crash land, the motors can suck up to 2A when stalling), and a separate USB power bank ("Hmm, it's a bit sluggish." The steering motor has two 5.6 ohm resistors wired to it and the L298N has a voltage drop of almost 1.5V at 5V, giving me about 1W of steering power with the USB. The original controller uses a tiny MX1508, which has a voltage drop something like 0.05V. Coupled with the 7.5V battery pack, the car originally steers at 5W. So, yeah, 5x loss in snappiness. Swap motor controller for a MX1508 and replace the resistors with 2.7R or 2.2R? Or keep the L298N and use 1.2R resistors.) Then went back to the 5 AA batteries. Screw it, got some NiMHs.
Tip: Don't mix up GND and +7.5V in the L298N. It doesn't work and gets very hot after a few seconds. Thankfully that didn't destroy the RPi. Nor did plugging the L298N +5V and GND to RPi +5V and GND -- you're supposed to use a jumper to bridge the +12V and GND pins on the L298N, then plug just the GND to the RPi GND (at least that's my latest understanding). I.. might be wrong on the RPi GND part, the hypothesis is that having shared ground for the L298N and the RPi gives a ground reference for the motor control pins coming from the RPi.
Tip 2: Don't wipe off the solder from the tip of the iron, then leave it at 350C for a minute. It'll turn black. The black stuff is oxides. Oxides don't conduct heat well and solder doesn't stick to it. Wipe / buff it off, then re-tin the tip of the iron. The tin should stick to the iron and form a protective layer around it.
Destroyed the power switch of the car. A big power bank in a metal shell, sliding around in a crash, crush. It was used to control the circuit of the AA battery pack. Replaced it with a heavy-duty AC switch of doom.
Cut a USB charging cable in half to splice the power wires into the motor controller. Hey, it works! Hey, it'd be nicer if it was 10 cm longer.
Cut a CAT6 in half and spliced the ends to two RJ45 wall sockets. Plugged the other two into a router. He he he, in-socket firewall.
Got a cheapo digital multimeter. Feel so EE.
Thinking of surface mount components. Like, how to build with them without the pain of soldering and PCB production. Would be neat to build the circuit on the surface of the car seats.
4-color printer with conductive, insulating, N, and P inks. And a scanner to align successive layers.
The kid really likes buttons that turn on LEDs. Should add those to the car.
Hey, the GPIO lib has stuff for I2C and SPI. Hey, there are these super-cheap ESP32 / ESP8266 WiFi boards look neat. Hey, cool, a tiny laser ToF rangefinder.
Man, the IoT rabbit hole runs deep.
(Since writing the initial part, I swapped the L298N for a MX1508 motor controller, and the D415 for a small Raspberry Pi camera module. And got a bunch of sensors, including an ultrasound rangefinder and the tiny laser rangefinder.)
