Radio Controlled Radio?

Well, I sure as hell hope so.

A couple of days ago I started my vivisection of Skrash, a loud, skeletal fellow who rides around in a badass car. The first order of business was to crack open the controller and see what was inside. I was somewhat surprised at how complex it was, but I decided that it probably makes sense. My mistake was thinking it was more complex than the car itself.
What's this? A crystal oscillator again, I see. This one operates at 24 MHz, but the D10 is somewhat mystifying. If I had to guess, I would say that the D10 is for the variation in frequency or amplitude that will make sure that only this car runs on this controller. I'm sure if I opened up another character from this series, his crystal would have a different combination inscribed on it, but would still communicate at 24 MHz.
Gah, this is the speaker that's in the remote control. It's the reason this toy is so thoroughly annoying. No matter how far away the car is, when you press any button on the remote control, this speaker will produce a loud, annoying sound, such as squealing tires, guns firing, or Skrash laughing it up like an idiot.This part puzzled me a lot, actually. This is the headphone jack, and it's easily the most intense piece of electronics in the whole remote control, and yet it serves no purpose at all. Of the six wires that come from it, only two are necessary to keep the remote control working properly. The jack is simply to be used when the toy is in the box. This way, without having the power to the remote on and wasting batteries, customers can put their fingers inside the box and press the buttons and hear what sounds the remote makes. It even says in the instruction book to discard the cord because it's "not for use in play". Weird...These little rubber pads are siting on top of small switches that allow you to make the car move forward, backward, and side to side when you press them. It's fairly simple, really, especially in comparison with the vestigial headphone jack.

The next victim in my vivisection was the car itself. I thought that the car would be a lot simpler than the remote control, and of course I was completely wrong, because that's just how things work.

This is just one of the circuit boards on the actual car. There are two, and I certainly didn't expect that.

This is the whole shebang after the vivisection. As you can see there are two regular motors that I could pull out and one motor that has a casing with a load of gears inside. The nice thing about that gear box is that it should allow me to attack that piece to the tuner mechanism of my radio. Since it moves so slowly, I won't have to fiddle with any gear ratios or resistors along the motor's circuit to get it to move at the speed I want. The other motors, however, are a bit of a different story.

What's the next step? Monstrification. I will now combine my remote control car with my radio, to make a remote control radio. I already have the radio mounted on a board, now I just have to create some motor mounts for the motors I'm attaching to the radio dials. Hopefully this should do the trick, and if it does, videos shall be posted.