I am part of a team competing in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Student Design Competition

The contest is to build a remote controlled vehicle that will fit inside a 30 cm cube and is capable of picking up cylinders of various sizes that will represent the land mines, it must then carry them across 3.5" or 7" barriers and place them in a designated area

I havent ever built an RC car before so I was just wondering if anybody here has any pointers

An immediate concern for our team is getting a remote control, we ordered one that would only allow us to control three things and we need one that can control at least five things, so if you know of any good companies to order fairly cheap controls off of, or if you have a particular model you would recommend I would apreciat it

Bump..

Can the operations be split into 3 with one remote, and 2 on another (with two operators, like Robot Wars)?

I am sure the pricing has changed some since I was into RC, but back then 4+ Channel remotes were $$$$, while 2 Channels were fairly cheap.

Someplace like www.towerhobbies.com is a good resource.

No, thats one thing they made very clear in the rules, one control, one operator, We had ordered a 3 channel off of Robotzone.com for $30, and we found a 6 channel for $90,

I just checked www.towerhobbies.com and the cheapest Transmitter that they had that would work for us was $110,

What ticks me off, is that a year or two our chapter of ASME, which has no more than 40 members built a Battle Bot, when they built it they spent quite a bit on the controller for it, I don't know how many channel it was, but it is safe to say it was at least 5, and now nobody knows what happened to the battle bot or the controller, it all just disappeared

Don't know if anybody is interested or not, but I figured as long as I had brought it up, I might as well show you some pictures of the Battle Bot that ASME built, wish I had been a part of building it,

http://www.engineering.uiowa.edu/~battle/images1/Publicity/fair%20pic/2002%20BB%20fair14.jpg

http://www.engineering.uiowa.edu/~battle/images1/Publicity/fair%20pic/2002%20BB%20fair13.jpg

Go to www.ebay.com ??

Do you have to use AM or FM? Futaba, Hitec, Airtronics, JR are all good brands. The tower hobbies ones are just Futabas with a different name on them.

I would buy a new radio, because the reliability is key in a competition. A 7 channel radio is around $200-300 new. They have alot of switches and dials in addition to the two sticks.

Computerized radios are nice bacause you can fine tune the end points and travel of a servo. This is especially nice when the mechanism has limited travel.

You probably have a pretty good idea how you are going to design it, but these are a few of the things I have observed in this area. I fly RC airplanes, have a boat and a couple of cars. My dad also flies RC helicopters, so I hope I can help you if you have any more questions.

we are restricted to using only ground frequencies, but we also have a pretty limited budget, right now we are considering a Hitec laser 6, 75 mhz transmitter, which we found on robotzone.com for $89.95