00211 RC car mod

An idea I've been entertaining recently (in my parlour with cucumber sandwiches) is to make a "robot sand drawing vehicle".

Now it was looking like a fully robotic (i.e. with embedded microcontroller) vehicle was going to be very expensive and complicated to make. However I've stumbled upon this article by a guy called Jason Striegel, in which he describes how to mod a cheap RC car to take a microcontroller.

The idea here is to create a programmable vehicle that will draw in the sand, either with one or more pre-programmed patterns, or taking an input from a digital image (say a drawing from a Palm Pilot) and copying it on a large scale. The image copying thing would be cool, although it sounds a little daunting to implement. We'll see.