How to Connect an RC Car and a Raspberry Pi to Remo.tv

FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS AT YOUR OWN RISK, I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE OR LEGAL ISSUES CAUSED. DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU LIVE NEAR AN AIRPORT, RADIO STATION, OR EMERGENCY SERVICES. If any of your signals interfere with air traffic control, emergency services (police, ambulance), etc they will come looking for your signal and ultimately you!!

If this does interfere with aircraft, the FAA (US) will come by with a DF and find you and you can be charged. Use with caution!

Supplies

• Raspberry Pi (3B and Up I believe)

• An RC Car (MUST BE SOMEWHERE AROUND 27MHz, ANYTHING ABOVE 30MHz will NOT work, be sure the car ISN'T 2.4GHz)

• USB Webcam

• Powerbank (To power raspberry pi, any generic powerbank will do as long as it has a usb port)

• Rechargeable batteries (For the RC Car, if the car comes with a rechargeable battery built in then you don't need to get this)

• Tape and Hot glue

• a female dupont wire (to connect to the pi as an 'antenna')

Step 1: Make Sure the Car Is Compatible With the Raspberry Pi

So first before you start tearing stuff apart you need to see if the car will even work with the raspberry pi, for sending the signals to the car itself I use pi-rc combined with using a socket to connect to the python code.

Put the dupont wire on GPIO 4/pin 7 (As shown in the image above; DO NOT BRIDGE ANY PINS!!!)

And then clone the git repo of pi-rc to the raspberry pi with this command:

$ git clone  https://github.com/bskari/pi-rc.git

After doing that, follow the instructions here to get the proper configuration and test it.

If it works, save parameters.json for later.

Step 2: Putting Together the RC Car

Make sure there is room for the pi to be mounted inside the car (after pulling off the body), mount the camera to the front and mount the power bank somewhere else on it, (if the bare circuit board of the RC car is showing then put something non-conductive between it and put the pi on top of the non-conductive surface, then tape the pi down on top of it

Step 3: Set Up the Remo Controller

To set up the remo controller, set it up normally - instructions here, then go to the "hardware" directory and delete all the code from the 'none.py' file and replace it with the code here, you will have to edit it some though, edit lines 19-43 to match what's in that parameters.json file you saved earlier. DO NOT CHANGE THE DEAD FREQUENCIES OR THE CODE RIGHT AFTER THE 'TIME.SLEEP'S!!!

After that, set up the remo.tv site controls accordingly

- 'f' = forwards

- 'b' = backwards

- 'l' = left

- 'r' = right

- 'bl' = back left

- 'br' = back right

Step 4: Running the Bot

Open up 2 ssh terminals into the pi, and start the pi-rc script by going into the folder the pi-rc code is in and running 'sudo ./pi_pcm -v' , then run the controller.py in the remo.tv folder manually by going into the remo controller folder and running python controller.py

DO NOT CLOSE EITHER SSH WINDOW UNTIL YOU ARE READY TO STOP THE BOT!