RC Car Tear Down

The first day efforts consisted in tearing down the car to understand how it works. On the bottom, the car has the battery holder. After removing it, we could have access to the IC that controls the car. There are two sets of wires that come out of this IC: one for the motor that controls the front wheels and another for the motor that controls the right wheels.

The back wheels only move forward and backwards. The front wheels only have controls to set their direction as straight, right or left. Apparently, they move with the impulse generated by the back wheels. On the pictures above, one can see the set of gears that controls the direction of the front wheels.
We didn't try to understand the IC that composes the board, since we are constructing our own circuit.

After the tear down, we used the HCS12 to control the wheels, which was our first accomplished milestone with this project.