RC Vehicle

A remote-control football delivery car built as my Leaving Cert Technology higher-level project. The thematic brief sat under UN Sustainable Development Goal 12 (sustainable consumption), so I framed the car as a stadium promotional product. A small, colourful vehicle that drives the match ball out to centre pitch while wearing environmental messages on every panel, turning a kick-off into a chance to broadcast a sustainability message to a full stadium.

Everything started in Onshape. The chassis and the wired controller box were laser-cut from 3mm green acrylic and bonded with weld-on cement, sanded smooth between cuts. The spoiler and the circular ring that cradles the ball were 3D-printed in PLA on the Ultimaker, since a single-piece roof was too big for the print bed. A 5mm brass rod, cut down on the junior hacksaw, forms the front axle and rides through holes I drilled into the wheel hubs. Twenty-odd environmental stickers and a pair of comically oversized googly eyes finish the front.

The brain is a BBC Micro:bit slotted into a Kitronik robotics board, powered by four AA batteries in the controller and tethered to the car by a rainbow ribbon cable soldered to two 1.5V geared DC motors. I wrote the control loop in JavaScript on MakeCode. Button A drives forward, button B reverses, both buttons together pulse one motor forward and one back to spin in place, and a tap on the Micro:bit logo cuts power. Each input throws a matching glyph onto the LED matrix, so the operator gets visual confirmation the input actually landed. The fiddly bit was the wheels. The hubs didn't have wide enough openings for the brass axle, so I drilled them out on a cordless drill, and on one of them I went a fraction too far and came out the other side. It glued on fine.