I finally have a product which is a bit more manageable. The first pass of working drive train code is in the repo. You can see the rolling chassis as well as the top and side view below. Now the board is powered by an Arduino Micro. The whole setup makes the car about 25% heavier and is much larger than the board it replaced. The original was approximately 2.5"x1.25" in. Hopefully I can put enough smarts into the code base to make the switch worthwhile. When shopping for my next vehicle I plan to get a much higher quality truck capable of easily displacing the weight. I've reasoned about how far I have to jack up the body to fit everything, so I will likely create some custom support pillars next.

Once I am satisfied with the back end, I am planning to install an external smart phone battery and a two port USB hub(one to the Edison, one to the Micro) to power the car remotely. I also want to make a dead man switch in case the two microcontrollers become disconnected from one another. I plan to add steering last as that should be a redundant operation.