The goals for this project were to use only parts I had laying around, finish it that afternoon, and make something the three year old kid would enjoy for at least five minutes.

See the pictures in the gallery on the left. Here are some highlights:

  • Two hefty DC motors from a printer
  • ATMega328 on the car, ATtiny85 on the remote
  • IR remote controlled
  • Frame is a piece of junk cutting board, wheels are small jar lids
  • Third wheel is a small caster
  • Everything is hot glued together

Those two blue bits with three wires are smd mosfets that I directly soldered to the wires and put in shrink tubing. Since there are no H-bridges the wheels only turn in one direction. Due to differences in the two sides it is not likely to drive in a straight line. That's ok.

I certainly could have used another ATtiny on the car, but I happened to pick up the bigger mega first. It doesn't matter since the parts will just go back into their bins when the toy reaches the end of its entertaining life.

A lot of the code, like the IR communication bits, was just borrowed from my older projects, so it didn't take much time to write. The git is here.

Most importantly, it works. The kid was having a great time with it. It didn't matter that it couldn't go straight since he was just randomly mashing the buttons and watching it do kind of a random walk around the floor. I did record some video, but since it is focused more on the kid having fun than the toy I don't think I'll upload it here. Sorry.