Amazing. Anybody want to get together and build a full-on robot arcade? I can see this being the future of 'virtual reality' gaming -- reality from a non-human perspective.<p>Battling drone fleets, tiny warhammer-style robots causing real destruction on a miniature scale, high-speed chases through scale sized representations of real-life courses...<p>Alas like so many good ideas, perhaps this is already happening somewhere...
I used to love Sega Rally. The amount of cash I dropped down those machines while racing friends. I think my ultimate games room would have a Sega Rally machine in the corner.
Weirdly, I did a project like this at uni, except we used an Xbox 360 controller to control the car, and I think more interestingly, we used MiWi (PIC chip wireless subset) to communicate with the car.<p>Whereas other teams sent a packet every time they did an "update" (they were using keyboard not 360 controllers), this meant there was a lot of lag as the link was limited to 500 bytes/sec, and sending a package irregularly meant lots of overhead.<p>What I did instead was I engineered it so we constantly sent (and received) a packet 40x a second, and this meant our updates were far less laggy and much more consistent. We just had a couple of bytes for the steering, a couple of bytes for the acceleration, and some other "flag" bits to determine what data should be sent back (reading off all the sensors at once leads to blocking).<p>We also had an accelerometer in the RC car, which I mapped (roughly) onto the 360 pad's force feedback, so you could "feel" what the RC was feeling.<p>The fact that we used miwi meant that we could control the thing over IP which was cool.<p>Great fun, we won too! I'm just sad that because our code was in a Dropbox shared folder, some idiot has deleted it.
That's very cool, and I'm surprised RC cars aren't being used in more Arduino projects. I wish it actually was a detailed post, because I'd love to learn more about the Arduino setup in there -- if he's using the Motor shield, how the batteries are hooked up, etc. And how much did the materials cost -- xbee radios are around $100 each I believe...
It's really wonderful to start to see this wave of Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other super inexpensive but plenty powerful enough for a range of applications type devices.<p>More and more are popping up on Reddit and HN every day and it looks to be ushering a little hobbyist "golden age". I can't wait to see where it takes us.