The Badland Brawler - RC Monster Truck with Arduino

The path to an off-road robot – our last two projects – The Spinel Crux V1 and The Spinel Crux L2 have been revolutionary successes within and outside our community. We built a gesture controlled robot and we made an add-on – a robotic arm and fixed on top of it. Our project secured first position in various competitions, and found its way on front pages of various magazines.

This time, we decided to get our hands dirty. We built an off-road 4-wheel drive robot, which can travel through rough terrain and can be remotely controlled using a mobile phone or a laptop.

Behold, the Badland Brawler

An amazing off-road robot using Arduino. This one is WiFi controlled, which means it can be controlled from anywhere with WiFi connectivity. This one have strong ripped tyres which enables him to crawl through any kind of terrain.

Arduino or Raspberry Pi for your Project?

There is a new version of Raspberry Pi - Raspberry Pi Pico which is similar to Arduino, available in the market for Hobbyists. This board is very simple, to begin with, and start building your projects! If you are confused about whether you need to buy Raspberry Pi or Arduino for your next project, fear not. In this post - Raspberry Pi Pico or Arduino we have explained everything in detail so that you can choose which suits best for your project.

Video Demo

Here is a demo video of the Badland Brawler to a get a taste of it.

Video Tutorial

Video tutorial will be added soon in our YouTube channel. Subscribe our channel for a complete video tutorial.

In this video series, we will explain everything about the off-road 4-wheel drive remote control robot, controlling it with the Android smartphone/laptop and will show you how to make a Badland Brawler robot yourself.

Make Your Own Off-Road 4-Wheel Drive RC Monster Truck

Saw the demo video? Really like this Badland Brawler? Wanna build this bad ass off-road 4-wheel drive RC Rock Crawler Robot?

Let us dive into the robotics tutorial section below and start building it. For your convenience, we will be dividing this post into various steps to make this robotics tutorial easy to follow and troubleshoot.

We will provide you with the design, code of the pick and place robot, and links to all the products used in this project including this cool robot kit.

Links to the robot building kit are also available in our project tutorial pages so that you can buy any robot building kit you want and build your own DIY robot as per your needs.

Get Your Components

To build one yourself, you will have to get an Arduino board with WiFi connectivity, a robot chassis and some sensors.

• Arduino MKR1000 or any WiFi supported Arduino board
• A 12V battery
• DC motors
• 4-Wheel Drive Off-Road RC Rock Crawler Robot Chassis
• L293D motor driver IC
• An Android phone with RootSaid – WiFi Command Center installed
• A WiFi network

Let's Get Started

Now let us start building your own RC monster truck.

Why not make a PCB for your Project?

Making a PCB for your DIY project is not hard nowadays. PCB helps to get rid of all messy wires and stuff and gives your project an awesome look. And it’s cool to make your own PCB for your project right?

Design your own PCBs for your Project!

I used Altium designer to draw the circuit and design the PCB. It is a powerful tool that can be used to design and create our own PCBs for our project as well as complex and multi-layer PCBs for industrial use.

If you are a DIY Electronic enthusiast, I bet this is gonna be really useful for you guys. I have been using it for the past 3-4 years and let me tell you guys, this is amazing! You can download the Free Trial of Altium PCB Designer from here.

PCB Design Tutorial using Altium

Check out the below video to start designing your own PCBs in Minutes!

Click this link for complete tutorial and codes.