In the beginning…

Ok, so I want to modify a controller so that it controls a car using a singe stick. My first thoughts were where can I get a single stick controller from? A quick search online didn’t find anything so I joined a forum and asked on there. They pointed me in the direction of this:

Hitec Focus Single Stick transmitter

Great. Looks like it could be a good start. Straight away I found one on ebay, won the auction and I’m now waiting for it to arrive. Having only paid £12.50 including postage I think I’ve got a bit of a bargain.

My plan for this is to simply cover the trimming levers and drill out a hole in a large bouncy ball and glue it to the control stick to make it more tactile for small and not very well controlled hands.

My thinking continued and I have set myself a goal. This is to have a number of cars that I can use together with a range of different controllers. I work in a school for disabled kids and I’d like to be able to take a selection of cars to the school and let the kids use them with whatever controller they are able to use. I’d like to have a transmitter for each car and a selection of controllers that can pug into the transmitter.

I’m mainly thinking about control methods at the moment as with it being January I don’t have a lot of spare cash to go out buying cars. So I got on ebay and I have ordered a couple of bits:

2x joystick modules

and

Caps for the joystick modules

I will need to build these into something. They are for a xbox controller so they’re pretty small but they will still need to be mounted inside some sort of box. That’s fair enough, I want to create a few different boxes to mount in different places. For example a student I know at the school controls his wheelchair with his chin, so he might be able to use one of these mounted in place of his wheelchair controller. I was also thinking that I might be able to build one into something small and handheld, then I had an idea that I might be able to modify a Wii Nunchuck controller. All the ergonomics and build has been done, I just need to gut it and re-wire the joystick. Shouldn’t be too hard (hopefully). So I ordered one of them off ebay as well:

Wii Nunchuck

Potentiometers have three connections to operate and there will be two with each joystick. I need a way of connecting these back to the transmitter. As I’m trying to do this on the cheap with commonly available parts I have decided to use ethernet cable for this. I will need five or six cores and ethernet cables have four twisted pairs, totaling eight cores. They’re easy to get hold of and easy to work with and have reasonably robust connectors. There’s also some spare cores for any future applications if I move into flying things.

Once these things turn up and I get some time to tinker with them I’ll get some photos on here detailing what I have done with them. For now I have one car ready for me to adapt. It’s a cheap toy RC car but I’d just like to test the theory on something cheap and readily available. I bought one of these a few weeks ago thinking about the possibility of switch adapting it:

Toy RC car

I have already taken the controller apart and it’s very simply. I am going try to re-house this in a joystick and I’m currently watching one of these one ebay:

Zipstik Joystick

I used to have one of these years ago for my Amiga. I remember it being very robust with suckers on the base. I am hoping there will be enough space to mount the controller board from the car controller inside and have the antenna sticking out where the cable goes. The buttons will be redundant but that doesn’t matter. Anyway, I’m hoping to get that for about a fiver.

I really want this collection of accessible RC cars to be made of decent quality cars like my Tamiya Lunchbox. If you don’t really know much about them here’s the toy RC car with my Lunchbox to show the size difference:

Toy RC car with the Lunchbox

Here it is in action:

I am currently selling some old stuff to generate funds to buy some cars and currently scouring ebay, Gumtree and forums for some bargain to grab when the funds allow.

I will update this blog when the ebay booty arrives. In the meantime if you have any ideas or suggestions that might help please use the comments box below.

Thanks.