Anki Drive teardown reveals IR steering sensor, tiny rear-wheel drive cars

Anki was invited on stage at Apple’s WWDC event in June to show how its upcoming miniature racecars would tie in with iOS 7. The demo was not without its issues, but the technology seemed impressive. Now that the Anki Drive cars have arrived, there is the temptation to see what makes them tick. So of course, the folks at iFixit have poked around inside an Anki and snapped some pictures.

There are no special electronics in the track itself, but there is a pattern of subtle ridges like the grooves on an old vinyl record. The car scans these grooves with an embedded image sensor to track its location. To get at the optical sensor and other components, all you need is a phillips screwdriver. Yes, no weird proprietary screws and no glue.

The circuit board inside the Anki car is fairly simple, consisting of a microcontroller, a Bluetooth chip, and the imaging sensor. There is also a small 3.7V li-ion battery on the underside of the board. All the processing that allows the cars to calculate routes and interact with each other is offloaded to your iDevice.

With a little prying, the bottom assembly comes off revealing two motors driving the rear wheels. These motors provide propulsion, but also steering by varying the power to each of the wheels. The Anki car knows which way to steer thanks to the lens on the underside of the circuit board. This contraption shines an infrared LED downward onto the track, which illuminates the pattern of ridges so the image sensor behind it can read them. Below the circuit board, the Anki car also packs 7.1g of weights that keep it stable while maneuvering around the track.

Two Akni cars come with the $200 starter kit, but additional ones can be bought for $70 each. Should you ever need to repair these pricey miniature automobiles, iFixit has given the Anki car a repairability score of 8 out of 10. That’s pretty good.