A ride inside a small RC car!

Ever wanted to take a ride inside a small , cheap RC car? Now it's your chance! I got this baby for 10 Euros from a chinese street salesman. It's 1/16 scale, works on 6 AA batteries, 27 MHz 2-channel controller, and is strong enough to carry a 120 gr. camera without losing speed!

The controls are really simplistic, You can either go full ahead, stop, full backwards, and steer steeply left/right. The electronics and mechanics are a bit crude but do their job.

Back in the 90s, even such a simple 2-channel RC car was very expensive, and with the equivalent of 10 Eur. you couldn't even buy a single-channel RC car.

It also has front lights and back lights, which I may upgrade to low-consumption ultra-bright LEDs. They make it pretty fun in the dark though, and you can see their light in the night driving sequences (I only wish my camera was a bit more sensitive though...)

All in all, I'd say it's really "value for money", and great fun to have/mod!

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• rc
• car
• onboard
• camera
• small
• radio
• controlled

[CaptCamping]

About the magnets, you need two of them. One glued to the car and the other one to the camera (if you are using small wireless). You mean digicam the bigger ones? in that case magnets wont work because it will be too heavy.

[Velktron]

@CaptCamping Yup, it's a typical compact-size point-and-shoot camera, which weighs about 170 gr. There's no way that a reasolably sized magned would hold it, especially since I'd have to use glue anyway to attach one magnet to the camera and one to the car. The best way would be to drill a tripod screw base on the roof of the car and attach/detach the camera at will without glue or magnets. Other solutions are pretty much shoestring and bubblegum :-p

[CaptCamping]

Instead of taping the camera on top of the car, use magnets. If you are going to make fpv driving on a tv screen, put the camera on the middle of the car on top or behind. Try to focus the camera so you can see the front bumper of the car. This way you can avoid hitting obstacles.

[Velktron]

I actually hot-glued it (!) in place between the "rear view window" and the "spoiler". The rooftop of the car was too tall and made the camera stick out too much, with little area to glue it securely.

After shooting, I melted the glue away. The camera I used is a square-sized digicam, made mostly of aluminum (which is non-magnetic) and the car is pure plastic, so magnets wouldn't help either of them fasten anywhere. I was driving the car normally like a RC model, not in First Person View.

[angrygunsmith]

cute but its craving a brushless enigne and lipo mod in it, i might leave the steering as it is.

[Velktron]

Heh, the ESC alone will be worth multiple times the car (but then again, the LEDs I added are worth a good fraction of it) ;-)

Shedding weight wouldn't help it much with its current engine/gearing/primitive stop/go brushed "ESC", but with a proper ESC it would be a different story. The real problem would be finding a brushless motor about the size of a 370 brushed motor, and wiring an ESC to the primitive control board. Practically everything but the chassis would need to be replaced :-D

[coolcar100]

I want to take apart one of my old Nikko RC cars (they're not actually old, I think it was 3 years ago I got them) but I'm a bit scared I might break the LED's or something :S I'll do it on the car that's LED's don't work due to water breaking their wiring... (I drove it through a puddle by accident, when the signal went to far D:)

[angrygunsmith]

yeh, but steering servo would leave as is, moght find a way to hook it up to the spektrum receiver

[Velktron]

Mostly acceleration. If you drive without too many stops and gos, you won't see much difference.

[Nucleartreasure]

Hmmmm my Jazz HDV 178 weighs reatively 200 grams because i picked up a 1:16 scale rc car and I'm planning to try the camera on the car. Hopefully it dosn't drain speed.