I built a system to drive my RC car from anywhere in the world
Wanted to share a project I've been working on. Basically lets you drive an RC car remotely over the internet with live FPV video. I'm arranging outdoor time attack tournaments with friends, somewhere in woods or in the open field. The setup: - Raspberry Pi Zero 2W mounted on the car with a wide-angle camera - ESP32 on the transmitter generating joystick voltages (needed because ARRMA's 2-in-1 ESC/receiver has no accessible inputs) - Cloudflare for the networking magic (TURN, Tunnel, Workers) - Browser-based controls - works on phone or desktop What it does: - ~100-200ms control latency…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Wanted to share a project I've been working on. Basically lets you drive an RC car remotely over the internet with live FPV video. I'm arranging outdoor time attack tournaments with friends, somewhere in woods or in the open field. The setup: - Raspberry Pi Zero 2W mounted on the car with a wide-angle camera - ESP32 on the transmitter generating joystick voltages (needed because ARRMA's 2-in-1 ESC/receiver has no accessible inputs) - Cloudflare for the networking magic (TURN, Tunnel, Workers) - Browser-based controls - works on phone or desktop What it does: - ~100-200ms control latency over internet (10-15ms on LAN) - 720p @ 30fps live video - Touch controls on mobile, keyboard on desktop - Admin dashboard for race management - Token-based access so I can let friends drive - Auto-stops if connection drops (safety first) - Adjustable throttle limits - Optional re-streaming to YouTube Built it because I thought it'd be cool to let people drive the car without being physically present. Currently running it on my 4G modem and it works surprisingly well. The whole thing is open source if anyone wants to check it out or build their own. The thing is, it's obviously not easy to get up and running for an average user. But maybe you'll find this useful. Total hardware cost is around $75 (Pi + camera + ESP32) assuming you already have the car and transmitter. Some features are work in progress: - Speedometer - GPS and track position - Gates system (will probably use short-range Bluetooth beacons) Here's a a technical article about the project that reveals a bit more of under the hood thinking https://romanliutikov.com/blog/building-internet-controlled-...
Does the same job
all alternatives →- IBI built a Raspberry Pi/Android driven toy car2012 · ▲64
I am not sure if this is fits the HN community, but I am posting it here if people are interested. This is the current iteration of the car: http://i.imgur.com/ko8YBh.jpg Details: I wrote a simple android app that streams the accelerometer data from the phone to the pi over a simple socket. The pi then uses this data to drive the DC motor and the servo motor. Tilting the phone to control the car feels very natural. In this[0] pic you can see the wifi dongle I've used. I am using Adafruit Occidental v0.2[1] as my OS because it has support for my wifi dongle. It also makes some hardware…
- ERESP32 RC Cars2025 · github.com · ▲335
This is a projected I started that blends both the fun of playing a split screen multiplayer driving game and controlling real rc cars. The cars can also be controlled via bluetooth gamepads and is meant to be easily hackable.
- SDSelf-Driving Pi Car2018 · github.com · ▲304
- HIHow I built a self-driving (RC) car.2012 · ▲300
I have been taking Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course. The lecture module on Neural Networks ends with an intriguing video of the ALVINN autonomous car driving itself along normal roads at CMU in the mid 90s. I was inspired by that video to see what I could build myself. A link to my incomplete write up was posted a couple of weeks ago (ouch!) but I finally finished it and open sourced the code tonight (so you can build your own self driving car). What do you think? http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar https://github.com/dps/nnrccar
- WBWe Built an Autonomous RC Car Using Neural Networks and Raspberry Pi2016 · github.com · ▲23
- IBI built a multiplayer Gameboy2023 · github.com · ▲157
Still very much a work in progress, but really wanted to share this even in it's early state. Had heaps of fun building it to learn more about WebRTC.
More work this month
the category →
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Launched alongside, January 2026
the whole month →- IN
Hey HN! I wanted to share something I built over the last few weeks: isometric.nyc is a massive isometric pixel art map of NYC, built with nano banana and coding agents. I didn't write a single line of code. Of course no-code doesn't mean no-engineering. This project took a lot more manual labor than I'd hoped! I wrote a deep dive on the workflow and some thoughts about the future of AI coding and creativity: http://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc
AI · Jan 2026 · cannoneyed.com
Automatic AI-powered code reviews the moment you open a PR
Dev tools · Jan 2026 · kilo.ai
