This is a short overview of the components used to make yourself a remote controlled car using a PIC32 microcontroller.

Have you ever wanted to make and control your own car, see below for the components used. In the future I will go over an in depth tutorial with schematics of the connections.

Items used:

• PIC32 microcontroller

• Power source

• L293D Push-Pull 4-Channel Driver

• XL6009 Step-up module
• Four Arduino wheels
• Breadboard
• Several jumper wires
• Some rubber bands
• Some cardboard
• My PIC32BTN Android application
• HC-05 Bluetooth Module
  

Most of the items used I found on eBay for fairly cheap. The power source I used was a 5 volt 10,000 mAh power bank that was then boosted to 6 volts using the step-up module which would power the car for several hours of fun. Seen in the video and photos I used my MAKEmicro32 microcontroller board seen plugged in the breadboard.

See my contact page to request the code I used or if you would like me to put together the in depth tutorial with schematics for a guide to connect everything together.

Click the above photos for details.

Have you ever used a resistor with a button on a breadboard so you can use the button to control something when the button was pressed or not pressed, with internal resistors on the input of your microcontroller you can avoid needing that resistor on the breadboard. This is a simple tutorial to demonstrate the use of an internal pull-up resistor seen on the left button in photo and an internal pull-down resistor seen on right button in photo that are internally available on a PIC32 microcontroller input pin, this example demonstrates them being used with a button to turn on or off an LED on each side of the microcontroller.

Example internal pull-up resistor code:
  pinMode(3, INPUT_PULLUP);

Example internal pull-down resistor code:
  pinMode(17, INPUT_PULLDOWN);

To read the current value on the input use:
  digitalRead(3);
  or
  digitalRead(17);

See the attached file for the complete code example using each one, an internal pull-up and an internal pull-down resistor. The way the code is written is that when the input pin reads high (3.3 volts) the LED is on and when the input pin reads low (0 volts) the LED is off.

Note (*) : Some of the PIC32 microcontroller versions only support internal pull-up resistors on I/O pins, so be sure to reference the datasheet if you are trying to use internal pull-down resistors on input pins. This code example is using a PIC32MX250F128B microcontroller which has both pull-up and pull-down internal resistors available to be used. Checking the datasheet for the PIC32MZ and PIC32MX1XX/2XX microcontroller versions, they have pull-up and pull-down internal resistors available.