RC Car Over Spektrum Remote

I had a bind and fly remote and receiver laying around that I decided to hook up to my RC car. I have always enjoyed tinkering with electronics and driving RC cars.

Here is the breadboard I made to get the timings right for the interrupt pins and before I had headers on the motor shield:

Next I removed all the parts from the car except for the rear motor and the front wheels. I also removed enough plastic so I could see the shaft that turns the wheels and connected a wire to it. Then this wire I bent enough so that moving it would pull the wheels with. I did wrap it around the shaft a few times so it would stay tight. I then glued the servo in place with hot glue.

Below you can see I am using pin 2 on the board for my interrupts on the motor shield. The shield passes the arduino uno ports through so you can still use them.

Below are the connections I made to Gnd, 5v, batteries, and the vin connector to link the power of the arduino with the shield.

I connected my DC motor to M1

My 3.7 volt plane batteries are connected in series to give the shield enough power. The shield then shares all this power with the arduino and RC receiver.

Here is my DX6i that I use to fly my planes with and am using with this project

Mine also came with an AR610 that made this work. You can probably get a knock off one online and do the exact same thing. If you notice, the data/bind port shows the polarity of the ports and the small squiggly line shows the data port that the servo signal connects over. You can connect the power to any of the lines as that doesn't matter. All the pins are connected together except for the far left ones. Here's a close up of mine:

Also note that my connectors wouldn't fit into the AR610 so I had to use a knife to make the corners rounded. I used jumper wires here and the ones already on the servo.

Here's a view of my finished product!

My code is below that I use to decode the PPM stream and output power to a regular DC motor that just so happened to already be in the car.

I hope you enjoyed my project and let me know if you end up building this too!

Here's a video of the car running, it goes pretty fast!