November 15th, RC-Car parts

In the last post we were successfully able to the hovercraft and have it slide smoothly along the floor. This was a very big step for our group but there was obviously a lot of work left to do to make our hovercraft better. After watching the video of the hovercraft sliding there were a few obvious problems with our design. The biggest being that the hovercraft needed to be pushed manually in the direction that we wanted it to slide. We want to be able to control the hovercraft so that some type of remote control can tell the hovercraft to turn on and drive in a certain direction. To address this problem we attached a high speed DC motor (14,000 RPM) to the back of the hovercraft. The placement of this motor can be seen in the picture below. When turned on this motor pushes the hovercraft in a certain direction based on how the fan is angled.

We are very pleased with the outcome of the fan we added to push the hovercraft forward. The next matter to attend to is being able to control which direction the fan is pointing so we can control which direction the hovercraft goes. In an attempt to figure out how to control a small vehicle we purchased an RC car from Walmart and took it apart to inspect it's parts and see how we can use those parts in our design. Below is the picture of the RC car and the parts we believe that will be useful to our design.

This RC car gives us an RC remote control with an antenna, 2 small DC motors, a battery pack, some small plastic gears, and the RC board with a receiver antenna.

  Another problem with the previous design is that even when we push the hovercraft in one direction, it doesn't stay going in the correct direction for very long. To address this problem we need to more uniformly distribute the weight on the base of the hovercraft and make sure that the skirt is uniform so that air is distributed correctly. This problem will need to be addressed as we decide exactly what components we want to be on the base of the hovercraft.