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The remote-controlled car, with what I'm pretty sure is an Airsoft pistol taped into place for testing.
HackedGadgets
From DIY gadget site
HackedGadgets
comes news of the
Armed Response RC Car
, a remote-controlled car onto which you can mount and remotely fire a very real pistol. Being from Texas and having spent no small amount of my youth playing with BB guns and remote-controlled cars, I was simultaneously horrified and intrigued.
The Armed Response RC Car plans require the sacrifice (though someone with a more dramatic bent might use "apotheosis" in this case instead) of a whole remote-control car, which must be at least partially disassembled in order to add the extra components (including the gun). Depending on your budget and how important you think it is to be able to see what you're shooting at, the Armed Response RC Car can also include a small video camera and transmitter to send back sound and video to the remote operator for display on a monitor.
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The vehicle in action.
HackedGadgets
The actual trigger-pulling mechanism takes advantage of an unused wireless channel in most RC cars' controllers. A typical remote-controlled car can be instructed to drive forward and backward and turn left and right, but there's usually an unused radio channel in the car and controller radios. The Armed Response RC Car uses this channel to transmit "pull" commands to a DC motor with sufficient strength to pull a pistol's trigger (the plans recommend using a weapon with a "sensitive trigger"). For added drama and impact, the channel can also be used to trigger a detonator, which could in turn set off an explosive and give you a tiny bomb on wheels.
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Okay, yeah, now I'm feeling a little weird about this.
The design comes courtesy of Jerod Michel in China, and the list of materials is quite easy to acquire (except, potentially, the "payload"). Aside from requiring a remote-controlled car to stick everything on, you'll need some batteries, a 12 volt, 5 amp DC motor, a transistor, a diode, a resistor, and a few other miscellaneous odds and ends. Anyone with basic maker-type skills could pull this design together without any trouble.
And once you've assembled your tiny wheeled terror, what would one do with it? Actually building a remote-controlled guncar and zooming it around your property
sounds
pretty cool, but the possibility of actually hurting or killing someone—or having your handgun scooped up and stolen—is very real. Replacing the actual pistol with an Airsoft replica or a BB gun certainly downgrades the project's potential lethality, though I'm still not sure it's something I'd want to tackle with my (theoretical, non-existent) kids. Still, though, this sounds like something 10-year-old me would have been desperate to build; with my trusty
Marksman air pistol
in place, nothing would have been safe... at least, not as long as I could run out to the car and re-cock it after each shot.
Ultimately, whether it's equipped with a rubber band pistol or a Desert Eagle, the responsibility of how the Armed Response RC car is used rests with the builder—at least until a
Maximum Overdrive
-type situation happens, and then God help us all.
