John,

Thank you for the pointer to the quadcopter video. It is spectacular.

I am a member of the Cardinal and Gray. The alumni organization for those who graduated from MIT over fifty years ago. I have been looking unsuccessfully for an alumni robotics club.

My impression is that the RC cars world (no microchip) and the VEX school competition world (both RC and autonomous but mostly RC) and the robotics world are completely separate. Then of course there is the land of production machine control.

The RC cars motor can draw up to 80ampere. These cars have a 7.2 volt battery pack that feeds directly to the ESC which in turn gives a dribble of power to the RC receiver. If the micro proto board which has its own battery pack were to provide the PWM signal to the ESC might I not have a power problem?

Really my problem is getting started. I thought the micro controller could be the middle of the car. The RC receiver gives it a low power PWM signal as per usual. When under RC control the micro interprets then passes this signal onto the ESC. If that were the design, the micro could take over control on its own without a command from the human.

I need to pick a microcontroller either a fully packaged one like the VEX, the RCX or the NXT or a proto board. In my past I programmed in machine language and on RISC. More recently it was C, C++ and some higher level languages. That was alll in the work office environment. At home I am starting from scratch. If this looks promising I am pretty sure I can get some help. I need a basic design.

Ken