RC Hypercar Pt9

The electronics for the RC Hypercar were a bit more complex than expected. This video is a deep dive into the inner workings of the microcontrollers, sensors and code that will run the RC Hypercar.
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If you're looking to send Serial data between microcontrollers, take a look at the SerialTransfer.h library
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#rc #3dprinting #arduino

[@Splarkszter]

I can't understand why your channel has so few views, your content is incredibly high quality, thank you so much for sharing so much!

[@IndeterminateDesign]

Wow, thank you!

[@Anselm1115]

the amount of work put into this is crazy, love it

[@torstonvodesil6709]

man this project is so cool, cant wait for the traction control video

[@Nixqy]

Just found your channel, this is awesome - very well explained, simplified just enough but still complex enough to learn something. Really excited to follow along here.

[@IndeterminateDesign]

Thanks! I enjoy getting to document and share my little projects.

[@philip_fletcher]

This is the content I'm here for! I start a new 'above my pay grade' project each Christmas always with the intention of finishing before spring. Needless to say, some are still running, so I understand (and admire) your motivation.

[@IndeterminateDesign]

Thanks! I think the biggest reason I put this up on KZbin is to force myself to complete the project.

[@philip_fletcher]

@@IndeterminateDesign Oh yes, an audience is always a great motivator! It's one of the reasons open source frequently creates awesome code.

[@robertscheer3002]

Kudos. Inspiring. Thank you!!

[@loopie007]

Excellent project. Hope to stand on your shoulders some day.

[@KompletterGeist]

I have a 12th scale rc pancar and on a parkinglot surface it's borderline undrivable. Considering yours is RWD as well, it's incredible to see how well it handles! I have quite a bit experience from fsae and can confidently say that aero has a very big impact even at 20mph. Love your project!

[@IndeterminateDesign]

Thanks. I always loved those 1/12th scale pan cars but I never hand the hand eye coordination to keep up with them. It’s very hard to find good parking lots to run this thing in, I just broke it yesterday running over a small rock.

[@taycash58xbl76]

love your content

[@Ender_Wiggin]

May want to consider using differential amplifier on the SPI lines to eliminate possible noise problems. rs485 transceivers are commonly used for this kind of thing.

[@mariusmossum2923]

I must first say that I admire your diligence in pursuing this goal of yours! Partly because I have aspired to do something similar myself. :-) I started writing something that gradually took on the length of an article, rather than a normal comment. So I chose to send you an email, rather than posting the whole thing here. Public posts of this sort tends to spawn more discussions than I care to be invoved it. Hence the email. I mention it here both to avoid having my email stuck in your spam-folder, and to support your work by posting something the algorith can pick up on. :) Keep up the good work!

[@IndeterminateDesign]

Thanks. I’ll check for your email and read it over here.

[@costin4985]

Amazing video! Really enjoyed it! Please always keep explaining the engineering behind the things you do

[@IndeterminateDesign]

Thanks! I’m glad you enjoyed it.

[@toolscientist]

Damn. This is a lot of work. When do you sleep? I'm surprised you're using RPM. I always try to keep everything in radians, then only convert to deg/RPM when displaying data for debugging.

[@IndeterminateDesign]

What’s sleep? 😂 Projects like this always seem so simple in my head, but the details always get you. That’s a great idea to keep everything in rad/s. I keep having to convert back and forth when I’m doing calculations. My brain is so used to degrees.

[@AlJay0032]

Nice

[@gp8666]

i also go over the top with my projects, very relatable

[@IndeterminateDesign]

Yeah, I think this is why I never seem to finish a project.

[@GatorGlider]

I've been dealing with the headaches of no-threads and didn't know about FreeRTOS. I'm now going to check it out on a Teensy 4.1 board. I love the PCB design BTW. Regarding PITA wiring, what are the costs (performance penalties) associated with scaling the size of the project. At some point the size of the printer to make the parts becomes an issue, but if creeping the size of the car a bit could help, it may be worth trying. Also, thank you again for the videos. This is an awesome project and I look forward to the next update!

[@IndeterminateDesign]

Yeah, FreeRTOS is really cool, especially if you have multiple cores. Things like SD Card writing block everything else otherwise. I really want to try the Teensy 4.1 out, let me know how it works out for you. I could redesign the car with more room for wiring without making the overall car larger, but it’s a lot of work because something always breaks. I don’t know, we’ll see how crazy this all gets.

[@shawnington]

Given how things have gone so far, if anything gets less crazy, I think you will decide that is room to introduce more complications haha, love what you are doing@@IndeterminateDesign

[@IndeterminateDesign]

Yeah, focus is hard. I want to get to the point where the car is reliable and I can drive the car for fun.

[@shawnington]

Would love to see you take it racing, even if thats giving it over to a really talented driver if it fits in any classes. Would be great fun if this kind of engineering resulted in real world performance differences over what the cars can do on their own wit foams on normal circuits.@@IndeterminateDesign

[@wildgophers91]

Have you considered the raspberry pi pico W? It has some interesting tricks with the PIO. Might be able to handle all inputs on the PIO and then a thread for wifi stuff and a thread for control stuff.

[@IndeterminateDesign]

I did buy one to play with. I think it might be good, and it’s definitely easier to debug. The killer though is the number of floating point calculations. Neither the ESP32 or the Pico has an FPU, but the ESP32 is so much faster. In the end, I may still need something faster yet like a Teensy 4.0.

[@loopie007]

The next step is to start using CAN Bus for all your data transfers. This will allow you to make semi-intelligent hubs that can read signals and put them on the CBus already formatted. Forget 2 Esp32's. Having an independent bus will allow you lots of Esp32s of different types. It will also allow you to separate your architecture into multiple independent blocks for use on any project. Add more blocks or Base Data at any time without extra wiring for the processors. It will be extra work to learn/use CAN Bus, but will really pay off soon and for every project after! Jump on the net!

[@IndeterminateDesign]

I’m definitely interested in learning CAN bus. I want to design a power distribution module for my full size car. The challenge with this project is the size. I couldn’t find a small microprocessor and a CAN transceiver to fit on these small 20x20mm PCBs. Do you have any recommendations?

[@loopie007]

@@IndeterminateDesign Email sent. :-)

for pcb mounting holes it's good idea to either add a plated through hole and don't connect it or do a keep out zone around it. If screw damages the board there is lesser risk of shorts. In easyeda to add keepout make a circle, right click, change it into solid region and on the right change the property to no solid from soild. You need to make it for the all layers that have copper.

[@IndeterminateDesign]

Thanks! I wish I had known about that. I would have never figured that out. For me at least, EasyEDA is very unintuitive.

@@IndeterminateDesign I tried to use ecad from fusion360. You need to make your own footprints and symbols, but I see that as a waste of time when you have lcsc integration and all the parts that you need. It's not that bad, but you can get used to it.

[@IndeterminateDesign]

I wanted to design the PCB in Fusion 360 but I just didn't have the patience. Maybe for version 2. The integration with LCSC was nice because I can't believe how many parts I chose ended up being obsolete.

[@bryanhutson6741]

Any chance you'd be willing to make your code public? What about the PCBs? I have a use case for adding a 24GHz radar

[@IndeterminateDesign]

I will make it all public with the PCB. I think you’ll want to wait until at least a version 2. There are some component placement flaws and hole size issues as well I need to fix.

[@shawnington]

Is there any chance you can link the papers you used for reference?

[@IndeterminateDesign]

I read so many, I probably downloaded 80 papers or so. The best one I can say watch everything on this guy's KZbin channel www.youtube.com/@ready-to-race. Many of the top teams don't publish much information, but I have found that Eindhoven does, so anything you can find from them: pure.tue.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/3899882/2428674401666.pdf This paper is good on acquisition, calculations and filtering of data www.hindawi.com/journals/wcmc/2021/4211010/

[@shawnington]

Thank you so much! I have really enjoyed following the progress of this project, it's really interesting to see the limits of what I thought was capable at scale pushed to the edge. @@IndeterminateDesign

[@bryanhutson6741]

I didn't see an accelerometer in your chart. In my real car, stability control is performed by an accelerometer sensing rotation and using a hydraulic pump to apply automatic breaking to the appropriate wheel to reduce vehicle rotation. The system works very well in snow. Will you be adding anything like this?

[@IndeterminateDesign]

The Bosch BNO085 has accelerometers and gyros, so I’m using that to record the accelerations. I won’t have hydraulics, but I will have abs and I can control the torque of each of the wheels individually when braking.

[@mpartee123]

Is there any chance that you will release the STL/STEP files for the hyper car on Printables? I have been watching for some time now and it would be pretty awesome to build a car myself. Also... I am not sure if you know about Nicholas Rhem and Drehmflight kzbin.info/aero/PLTSCOv-lGtMax-oA4Pnq8OTxd4fTucrjQ but it seems like a lot of the mixing principals found in the code could be utilized for torque vectoring, active aero, etc.

[@IndeterminateDesign]

The plan is to release the files necessary to build the RC Hypercar. I’ve begun the documentation on how to print and assemble the parts of the car. Also working on the final monocoque and suspension. The car needs to be 4WD so the motors don’t get as hot. I’m testing different a 4:1 drone ESCs, but the packaging is tight even this requires changes to the monocoque. Also making some aero changes because the weight balance of the car has changed. I see why F1 teams have such a hard time making updates to their cars 😂.