Control your R/C vehicle from your iPhone
Posts tagged car
What a week!
Apr 22nd
Last Thursday I took this project to my uni’s (Bournemouth) sports hall to take it for a spin. I can say that after 6 months of development, money wasting, blood swear and tears it nearly made me shed a tear to see this fully working with no issues whatsoever (apart from the camera static) in the hands of some of Bournemouth’s most dangerous and incapable drivers. Even worse I’d not been in a sports hall for a while and had forgotten about how polished and pristine the floor normally is.
Any way enough talk here’s the video!
WiDrive Open Beta from Gavin Williams on Vimeo.
If you want to get your hands and try this out, make sure you keep upto date with our Bournemouth University Graduation show taking place at the end of May this year! @gotoandplay2010
I wanna try and get this on the front page of Digg so… DON’T FORGET TO DIGG THIS POST! 
Driving over the internet…
Jan 22nd
A friend of mine (Tom) wanted to drive the car over the net, thought I’d give it a go as I haven’t even tried it yet. I’ve basically opened up my network so Tom has direct access to the car from a few URL’s, when he clicks on the URL’s I’m just messaging him telling him where which way the car’s going. The video’s below.
How Annoying!
Jan 22nd
Alright, so I’ve been working on the iPhone app today and thought I’d start with something simple, you know, “press button car go forward” kind of thing child’s play… one might think. Well I was wrong! Unfortunately from my testing the WiShield can only handle 1 http request per second, in laymen’s terms think of it as a really juddery movie, you know when you watch a movie on megavideo or something and it’s constantly stopping to buffer because your stupid house mate is taking up all of the bandwidth downloading hardcore porn, think of how frustrating that is for you, and you’re just watching the thing.
Any way! Now I need to find some other way to communicate with the arduino that’s not to processor intensive. Apparently the WiShield supports other TCP/IP protocols such as UDP and Sockets, once I find out what these things mean I’ll get back to you, to be honest I’m quite surprised I got this far in the first place, I haven’t got a clue what I’m actually doing, I guess I’m just leaving it to fate and hoping everything just falls into place, which it normally does!
On a positive note though, I’ve created my first useful ugly iPhone app today, it’s not pretty I’m not gonna lie, but it’s reading the accelerometers on the iPhone, I’ll translate this into degrees so that when I turn the iPhone the wheels turn too and when you tilt the iPhone forward the car goes forward, and when you tilt it backwards… well I think you can see where I’m going here. Luckily my Nissan GTR kit came with some headlights, so I’ll add a lights button on the app too, so you can be all stealth and then BOOM! LED’s come on! And Dan’s been helping me paint the car, so it’s looking pretty sexy right now.
Any way, that’s it for me for today, it’s 3:00 in the morning, and I’m pretty sad to be on here to be honest, I should be in bed or out getting drunk.
