Remote controlled car cake

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As well as making my own cake for cake international, I've been rather heavily involved in making these remote control car cakes. Once you add sugar paste icing and a large chunk of cake these things start to weigh quite a lot so moving them round becomes quite a tricky challenge. This car has been through a few iterations before it will go into product development, this is the first version.


I decided to use the ESP8266 wifi chip to function as a controller on these devices. They're able to act as a webserver and deliver HTML pages directly to your own device without the need for any kind of app. As most of the people in the cake world seem to use iPhones and I have android seemed the easiest solution.


I wanted the car to keep the traditional Ackermann steering mechanism, so I used a servo to directly drive a linkage mechanism. The little 9g servo just about coped with the turning forces but it needed to be enlarged once all the cake was put on top of it


Two motors controlled the rear wheels, these were directly attached to the drive wheels. Wheels and motors were bought as a single and designed to be connected together. The motors were driven by an L298N dual H-bridge chip.


This iteration was functional as you can see in the video but it all needed beefing up a bit to provide any kind of longevity. I'll discuss more of the design in the next post and try to keep you all a bit more involved while I'm stuck in development mode.

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