Remote-Controlled RC Car

Built with Sarah Rodrigues and Helen Chang for a term-long Projects in Engineering course — the goal was a remote-controlled, F1-style race car to run on a track we designed ourselves.

Overview

A ground-up remote-controlled car that lives at the intersection of electrical and mechanical design. It’s driven by a brushless motor for rear-wheel drive and a servo on the front wheels for steering — and nearly every part, from the circuit boards to the chassis, was designed and fabricated by hand.

The RC F1 car project — from the team's weekly engineering build log.

The electrical side

I got access to a Voltera circuit-board printer, which let us design, print, and test our own PCBs rather than relying on off-the-shelf boards. I designed the board in KiCad — which was a real learning curve: beyond wiring the schematic and getting the pinouts right, I hadn’t realized that assigning footprints and laying out the physical board from the parts was its own whole stage of the process.

The drivetrain runs on a brushless motor (rear-wheel drive) through an ESC, controlled alongside the steering servo from a microcontroller. Researching brushless motors and the ESC was eye-opening — I’d naively assumed a motor was a one-size-fits-all part, and comparing motor types, batteries, and speed controllers taught me how they actually work.

Debugging the radio control was one of the hardest parts: I tried three different approaches to a stubborn communication problem before finally getting it working by editing the RadioHead command in terminal. We also pushed into tools that were new to all of us — a resin printer and the Voltera — which meant a lot of trial, error, and correcting.

The mechanical side

The car uses Ackermann steering — the geometry that lets the inner and outer front wheels turn at slightly different angles so all four wheels trace clean arcs through a turn. Getting from that geometry to a working linkage was the toughest mechanical challenge, and it gave me a new appreciation for how many parts hide beneath the “looks” of a car: axles, knuckles, differentials, and the ESC, not just the wheels and rear wing.

Structural and custom parts were 3D printed, modeled in Autodesk Fusion 360 — and printing was its own iterative battle, swapping printers, slicing and re-arranging the print file, and experimenting with support types until the parts came out clean.

What I learned

Designing, printing, and debugging our own circuit boards on the Voltera + KiCad.
Driving a brushless motor + ESC and a steering servo from a microcontroller.
Translating Ackermann steering from geometry into a working linkage.
Coordinating three subsystems — code, circuit, and chassis — so the pins, the wiring, and the physical space all agreed.
Iterating relentlessly between CAD, print, and physical test, and learning new tools (resin printer, Voltera) under real time pressure.

If we had two more weeks: clean up the Ackermann steering so it works and looks the part, and finish migrating the soldered board to a Voltera-printed PCB — the plan from the start.