Lots of people, both young and old, love playing with RC cars, even though some of them have long since been old enough to drive real cars. One guy has taken the hobby to the next level, making a wireless Arduino-controlled car.
Blair Kelly has create the Wifly Mini (the “Wifly” rhymes with “Wi-Fi”). It’s an Mini Cooper RC car that’s controlled over Wi-Fi using a video game controller. The car has a camera that can send a view of what it would be like if you’d shrunk yourself down and gotten behind the driver’s seat. Even better, it sends force-feedback information back to the controller, so you can feel every bump and jolt your car experiences as it drives around.
The view from the camera and the force-feedback makes it seem like a real-life video game. It’s even possible to move the camera around manually like in many games. I could see something like this being commercialized, with a series of RC-video game hybrids not just rendering some fantasy world, but incorporating the real world as well.The information to build one yourself is located on Kelly’s website linked above, which comes to us courtesy of Hacked Gadgets.
This kind of thing is best seen in action, so here’s a video of the car being driven, complete with a view from the camera:
If you’re more interested in a high-tech way to control a real car, check out our post on a car being driven by an iPhone. You might also like this RC Dragon that breathes fire.
