Current Part:
R/C Car Transmitter
R/C Car Receiver
Servo Extension Cables
10kΩ Resistor
Blue LED
47uF Capacitor
20 MHz Crystal
10A H-Bridge Motor Controller
Breadboard
Wires
SIPS
7805 +5 Voltage Reg
12v Power Supply
PICkit 2
Parts List Details
Most of these parts have been used in other projects and tutorials, however if you've never seen some before never fear! I will describe the important parts in greater detail below.
7805 +5v Voltage Regulator
The system we are building will use +5v for the power supply. Since a +9v battery is used for input, we need to use this regulator to bring things down to +5v. The regulator is good for supplying regulated +5v up to 1A, more than we'll use in this project.
PIC 18F452
The PIC will be used in this project to receive and interpret the command signals coming from the wireless receiver and sent by the transmitter. From these input signals, the PIC will output appropriately to an LED and a Motor to demonstrate how well things work.
R/C Car Transmitter and R/C Car Receiver
The transmitter and receiver pair share operating on a single frequency to transfer information. This is typically a 1-way communication path except for in newer 2.4 GHz wireless, which is more advanced. This pair can control up to 5 servos at once, however we are only concered with using 2. Almost all R/C hobby transmitter and receiver pairs operate in the same way, so if you don't have this exact one, that's ok.
20 MHz Crystal
The actual clock frequency used is not important, so long as you know what frequency you are using because you will need to know it for some timing calculations when you get to the software portion of this tutorial.
Blue LED and 10A H-Bridge Motor Controller
Since the Futaba radio control system has 2 channels, we'll want to have two devices to control, one for each channel. A single LED will be controlled by one channel and a motor will be controlled through the H-Bridge motor controller board built in a previous tutorial on PyroElectro.com.
12v Power Supply, Wires & Breadboard
The other items are just for power, connections and the platform to hold the PIC. A 47uF capacitor is used to stabilize the DC input power from the +5v 7805 voltage regulator.