Tagged: RC car

Controlling a Toy RC Car with a HackRF

Over on his blog Radoslav has created a post showing how he has used a HackRF to wirelessly control a toy RC car by reverse engineering the wireless control protocol, and generating the control signals in a C++ program.

Having already created the rf-car HackRF RC car control software on GitHub a few years ago, Radoslav was easily able to modify it for a new RC car that his daughter received. The process was to simply look up the FCC data on it, finding that it operated with 2.4 GHz and used GFSK modulation. He then used the Inspectrum signal analysis tool to determine the bit strings used to control the car. Finally using, his C++ interface to the HackRF he implemented the new bit string and GFSK modulation.

The video below demonstrates Radoslav controlling the RC car with the keyboard on his laptop.

Controlling 2.4GHz FSK car with HackRF

In the past we've posted about another project that also used a HackRF and computer to control a RC drift car, and another project that used the RPiTX software to control an RC toy car with GNU Radio and a Raspberry Pi.

[Project also seen on Hackaday]

Controlling an RC Car with RPiTX

RPiTX is a piece of software that you can run on your Raspberry Pi unit, which with no additional hardware turns it into a full radio transmitter, capable of transmitting FM, AM, SSB and other signals anywhere from 5 kHz to 500 MHz. Of course remember that the methods used to do this emit a lot of harmonics, so to be legal and safe filtering should be used on the signal output.

Over on Twitter Cyril‏ @kotzebuedog has been experimenting with RPiTX and his radio controlled toy car. From the videos and images, it appears that he’s used GNU Radio to create the required control signals which then transmits the data to the RC car via RPiTX. With this he’s been able to create a program to control his RC car with his computer gaming joystick.