As this not a stepper motor, in order to straighten the car out you’d need to steer the other way for a fraction of a second, just enough to rotate the shaft and straighten out the wheels. Both are standard DC motors and while it makes sense for the acceleration motor, steering needs a bit of assistance. There are two motors running the show here, one for acceleration and one for steering. The huge bulge in the middle is the 6xAAA battery holder. Always a good day when you don’t have to pry electronic toys open. Same as with the remote, the purely cosmetic top is held to the chassis with a couple of Phillips screws. Now – the Goliath.Īctually more space inside than I first anticipated. It was actually quite apparent after a while as the remote died way before the Goliath did. Looks like there’s a lot of power lost in the step down from 9V to 3v3, coupled with the the fact that 9V batteries have a very low lifespan guarantees the remote will run out of juice fast. The whole remote is powered by a single 9V battery, but as far as I see no device on the board that needs it in any way… The IC is rated at 3v3 max.

From what I can tell the 4 buttons drive the IO pins on the chip which in turn acts as the master SPI device which sends data via the antenna to a slave device, presumably the same chip in the car itself. The IC is a hard-to-find-a-datasheet-in-English one-time-programmable 2,4GHZ single chip wireless transceiver (XNS102). The other side shows 4 buttons controlling all possible directions of the Goliath’s movement – Forward, Back, Left and Right. The circuit looks fairly simple – a 3v3 AMS1117 voltage regulator and an IC as the brain of the whole operation. Glad there was no glue, all you need is a good old Philips screwdriver. First – the remote.Ī couple of screws and the thing comes apart. So I thought “hey, what the hell” and decided to tear it down to see what makes it tick and see if a modification and feature upgrade is even feasible. I turned my eyes to my Homefront: The Revolution RC Goliath, I was never happy with the way it worked… The acceleration felt very ‘digital’ and there was nothing else other than driving it. None of the products really looked liked a good value for money proposition. I’ve started looking for a tank chassis online and got a bit frustrated. The concept is quite easy as most chassis come with the motors and using a Wii Nunchuck to control the thing should be fairly straight forward. I lately got interested in building my own Arduino powered RC tank using a couple of motors, a motor driver and a pre-made tank chassis.

Homefront the revolution mods