Fitness Racer: PC Control of an RC Car

An anonymous reader writes "This project gives step-by-step instructions + source for connecting a cheap RC car to your parallel port and driving it around with a Dance Dance Revolution pad (or joystick). A fun way to make an old toy fun for another few hours, and another way to pretend that reading Slashdot may eventually lead to body movement."

Wifi + Webcam

[aardwolf204]

Give it WiFi and a webcam and I'm sure it would be even more fun. ;)

Great extension...

[Short Circuit]

...to OSS racing games. :)

Did this once

[proj_2501]

For one of my senior-year classes at URI, we took apart the remote to a cheap car and did a similar trick of using transistors to simulate the switch-hitting.

We connected the transistors to the parallel port of a Motorola ColdFire eval board and wrote some software to program routes.

It would have been useful if the damn thing had any range whatsoever, but we spent a whole nine dollars on the car, so I'm not worried.

Now add a camera...

[Phat_Tony]

Now add one of those cheap cordless X-10 video cameras to the RC car, and watch the video on the computer while you drive it around using the computer controls.

Have all your friends get these too, and set up a little race course. It'll be just like a first-person driving game, but you'll all have real little cars you're controlling.

- Phat Tony.

waste of time?

[pdk]

I'm glad to see we're hitting the bottom of the barrel today on news. I built a PC controlled RC car in highschool. gee, to think I could be famous for posting photos and a webpage about it RIGHT NOW.

Design changes

[JMZero]

I've found it's a lot quicker to build this kind of thing using relays for the switching. It means you don't have to do any thinking, and the switching speed is certainly fast enough for the application. I still used transistors to fire the relays - but it's still an extremely quick project.

Using relays also means the project can be re-used with different hardware much more easily - just change what's hooked up to the relays.

I also recommend the "UserPort" driver, which simply yields parallel port control to userland applications. Much simpler than monkeying about with special drivers.

similar idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been thinking about this for a while. With a Single Board Computer and a SV203 Board from Pontech (as listed on the palm pliot robot kit site) you could have some fun with this kind of thing. I would like to find a way of using the real RC controller to still drive it, but a Zaurus and WiFi would work good too :)
The thought of driving it around the parkign lot, then hitting a repeat button and watching it do teh same moves on it's own would be fun...not too mention all the possibilities of cameras and "defensive" programming/hardware :)

All this time I've been using DDR pads for DDR??

[burbs]

Though the pads are somewhat worn out, it is good to know that I have something to attempt in the near future.

But on a more serious note... could this have real-world applications in the future for someone who didn't have arms or hands? Could this, later on down the road, evolve into a foot-controlled robot that did basic tasks for those that needed it?

Re:taking the idea further

[X-rated Ouroboros]

Funny you should mention that.
There are several robotics projects out there that use PDAs for processing and control functions. Just get a wireless enabled PDA.

A friend and I have ripped apart a couple RC cars for this sort of thing. Instead of hooking the remote up to a parallel port, though, we hooked it up to a Basic Stamp. Been talking about hooking it up to a serial/parallel port just so we don't have to program in PBASIC anymore.

Also talking about duct taping the hacked remote to the RC car and then adding various sensor inputs to the basic stamp. Oh, and the rotating knives... but that's another matter. Just your basic programmable autonomous robot for considerably less than many of the kits out there.