Make Very Easy Robot Car That Is Smartphone Controlled

Hello readers In this Instructables I will show you how I made this Easy Robot Car at home with basic electronic components and the cool thing about this robot is it can be controlled by a smartphone.

The normal toy car that you might have hands-on when you were younger has very little battery backup and the movement of those is limited to 4 directions I'm talking about the cheap cars.

As the ages passed by we grew up older to build our own cars! Yes, that is the essence of growth, so I came up with the idea of making my very own car.

This is a very interesting project to consider if you are a beginner in robotics and have an eagerness to learn.

From the other point of view, you are not only building this car but learning how a motor contributes to the working of a car, the Electronics part, The hands-on experience in programming, and some physics when the car finally works.

You will have a real experience, So I would strongly recommend you to build this as it is one of the best ways to get started.

This car is controlled by a smartphone and is a very fun build, taking up less time to complete. I have concluded this article with a working video of the project.

NodeMCU or as few call ESP8266 board from amazon

L298N motor driver from Here

BO motors known as hobby gear motors with wheels I bought from here

Pieces of cardboard

Hot glue and super glue

Jumper wires

Lithium-ion battery and holder

Switch

Below are the alternates if you wish to make a fancy version

3D printer got from here

PLA filament

Tinkercad application

Cura slicing software

Note that these are affiliate links and you will get the product at no extra costs

The 3D design is made with the TinkerCad application and you can use my STL from the file below.

You have 2 options here, one is a 3D printed part and the other is cardboard.

The 3D printed frame I showed here is very strong and is printed with PLA filament, You can choose filament color as you wish, As most of my readers might not have a 3D printer we will proceed with the other method.

The template that I made to make the body was based on BO motor design consideration.

The same template was traced onto the cardboard and this became the base of our robot car, you can 3D print too like I said earlier.

Once the base is ready we can glue the DC motors, wait for the glue to dry and the wheelbase is almost ready.

This is the circuit that we are using for this robot car, we will not use any breadboard instead we are using the jumpers directly between the components.

Before making a connection make sure that the ground of the battery is connected to the motor driver along with GND of the Nodemcu board.

The positive of the battery from the holder is connected to the 12v slot of the motor driver and the 5v of the motor driver is connected to Vin of the Nodemcu board

Now for the communication the connection between the motor driver and Nodemcu is as follows

• ENA To GPIO14 (D5)
• ENB To   GPIO12 (D6)
• IN_1 To GPIO15 (D8)
• IN_2 To GPIO13 (D7)
• IN_3 To GPIO2 (D4)
• IN_4 To GPIO0 (D3)

In the end, I will connect the BO motor terminals to the motor connection slots on the motor driver.

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I bet you have not seen anywhere such assembly capabilities.

Connect the board to the computer using a programming cable.

Open arduino ide copy the below codes and paste them into the IDE.

If you wish to have your custom name for the Wi-Fi you can edit my name on the code but if you are not aware of this fully I recommend not to make any changes.

Click on the board and select on esp8266 module board, Now check for the proper com port number and click on the upload code button.

After some time the code will be uploaded to the board and the board now has the code.

After this is done test the project by switching on the power supply from the battery, when you switch on the button if everything is fine the Nodemcu LED glows and you can see the wifi name on the mobile phone.

Since the robot car that we are building has only 3 wheels, the front one is just the free-moving wheel.

The other 2 wheels are held by the motor shaft, Now for this we are using a simple mechanism, All we have to do is use a straw or a piece of tube.

If you don't find any tube you can prepare it yourself, just roll the strips of paper into the tube and strengthen it with drops of superglue.

Place on the tip of the cardboard and secure it with super glue.

Now you can add the wheel and lock it from the center using the tube or your homemade paper tubes!

The base model is ready, Now we have to add the electronics and it is not a complicated task.

I will start this step by adding a drop of hot glue to the cardboard followed by adding the lithium-ion battery holder with batteries.

Next, I secured the motor driver to the cardboard, we can add the wires of the BO motor to the driver slots.

In the end, we can place the Nodemcu board, Instead of placing this board directly on cardboard i have used a small piece of plastic square frame.

I glued this frame first followed by adding the board later and adding a tiny amount of less hot glue.

By the end of this step, the model is ready and now we can move to test this robot car.

Establishing a connection between the robot and the smartphone(control device) is very easy.

We will be using the Wi-Fi connectivity, Switch on the Wi-Fi on your phone first and later power on the car.

You will see the name of the wifi that was given to the car on the smartphone, Connect to the network.

Now you can open the application that is pre-installed on your phone, And there you go you will have the digital on-screen remote by which you can control the robot car in more than 4 directions.

You can just see from the image that how cool the car works and it's truly a joy for the creator to see his creation in action.

If you have any queries about this car, feel free to reach me via the comments.

You can watch this video where I have made a video tutorial for making this project, you can refer to the video if you don't have any idea how to operate the smartphone remote.

The working of this car will definitely inspire you to build this project, All the best and happy building :)