The Dream Cheeky USB car is a small remote control car that can be controlled from you PC. Taking apart the transmitter side there is a single chip covered in potting compound and two crystals, one at 12Mhz and the other at 27.2 Mhz. There is an antenna wrapped around the enclosure, but this antenna is to short to be an effective 1/4 length antenna for either frequency. The antenna is about 30 cm long which would correspond to a frequency of 260 Mhz. Here is a picture of the transmit side. The potted in chip is on the other side of the board along with a bunch of surface mount resistors. The first hack was to run the transmit antenna straight up in a drinking straw. This increased the range of the car out to about 1.4 meters.
I then took the car apart. There are a couple of transistors used to drive the motors. There is a small pot that can adjust the receive frequency. The steering is done by energizing a small electromagnet that drives the front wheels and there is a small gear motor in the back which drives the rear wheels. A small battery provides power and is wired to the two contacts in the back for charging. The cars antenna is wound up inside the top of the car. I unwound its antenna and ran it up a drinking straw. Now the range increased to about 2.4 meters. These seem like small changes, but they dramatically effect the performance of the car.
The next task is to figure out how to control the car from some application other then the provided dream cheeky software. The driver uses the USBHID dll so it should be pretty easy to take over. There is some amount of documentation on the net about another dream cheeky product “Dream Cheeky USB missile launcher” so that might be a starting point for writing software for this device.
Ultimately I would like to control this car from Roborealm.
Here is a short video of the car driving controlled from the computer station several meters away.
Here is a picture of the finished product.
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