The iPhone has many uses and a number of people have created various programs for it including a remote control for your home. Now, two programmers from the Czech Republic have made software for the iPhone which can control your RC car.
The control system has a couple of nice features. The screen features five buttons which four of them are used to control the car in a more traditional way, forward, backwards, left and right. The fifth button is the magic one though because when you press this the accelerometers in the phone are activated and you can control the car by tilting the iPhone.
The whole system sounds like it was complicated to put together, but I was surprised to find out it only took an idea and one afternoon to make a working version of this. The system follows this structure… iPhone -> OSCemote -> WiFi -> PC -> Max/Msp -> Serial port -> Arduino -> Original controller.
OSCemote is used here to send data from the iPhone over to your PC. Data is sent over Wi-Fi. Once the data arrives at the PC, some software simplifies the data and then pushes it out via the serial port to Arduino. Arduino is a dev kit which has a microprocessor. This developers kit can be then connected to the remote control and you then have a fully functional iPhone RC device.
The idea is brilliant although a lot of equipment and communications is needed. It’s a shame the Wi-Fi on the iPhone cannot be adjusted to communicate with the car direct… but no doubt that wi-fi is not anywhere near the same signal range of RC equipment.
Via: GeekAlerts and josef-prusa
Pretty cool, but I agree that there are way to many pieces needed to make this work.