Building the mounting plates for the hardware

There are many options to go for when it comes to mounting your Nano and the rest of the hardware to your RC car.

Option 1: 3D printing

If you’re planning on 3D printing your parts, take a look at:

I actually used the Chilicorn Rail for the first iteration of my build, and was very lucky to have been introduced by my mentor to Mitch, who printed out the parts and helped me out with a ton of stuff since then:

3D printed parts

Even if you’re not planning on using this method, I’d still recommend at least getting the RPi camera mount 3D printed, since it’s kinda difficult to get it to the right angle and position if you’re making something out of raw materials yourself.

Option 2: Hack something together yourself

If you’re planning on hacking something together by yourself, you can pretty much do anything you want. I used a special aluminium plate I got as a donation for my thesis from my mentor’s father :):

Aluminium

After some modeling and tinkering, I came up with the following idea for my mounts:

The only thing left now is to measure the aluminium, mark down where to drill the screw holes and assemble it together, but being the lucky man that I am, my hand drill broke down just as I wanted to drill the aluminium, but fear not, I had this bad boy standing by:

Drill

And after measuring up the dimensions and taking my materials, much to my surprise, I successfully drilled up my plates and got this:

With some zip-tie magic and screwing around 🙃 this was the end result:

Final car

Nevermind the disconnected antennae, we’ll get to that in a second.

That should be it as far as the ‘dumb’ part of the hardware is concerned. On to connecting all of the stuff together and setting up the Nano!