› RC Maker
You may have heard the name “Arduino” tossed around if you’ve spent any time around the maker/hacker crowd, but unless you’ve researched building your own custom electronic controllers, it may be little more than a funnysounding name (which people still argue over the pronunciation of!). It started as a program to help students at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy, build inexpensive controllers to work with sensors and actuators. Believe it or not, the name was borrowed from the name of a local bar in which Arduino’s creators used to meet. What those guys came up with was an open-source platform of microcontrollers—and the software to run them—that was inexpensive and simple enough to for even non-engineers/programmers to master. And because it is covered by the GNU General Public License, pretty much any company or individual is free to develop hardware and software tools to work with it.
Yeah, Ok—great. But what can it do? Well, because it’s open source and nearly infinitely programmable, a better question is probably what can’t it do. For one thing, with a fairly simple set of connections and commands, you can effectively add a bunch of extra channels to your radio/ receiver combo. Or you can program an Arduino board to manage a wide range of onboard features—among the most popular are multifunctional lighting systems. Drone guys love Arduino; many custom drones use Arduino to manage flight control by networking gyros, sensors, and independent motor/speed control to maintain in-flight stability. The same principle could be adapted to create a custom stability control system for an RC car or truck.