Published October 22nd, 2003 by Jim O'Halloran
Driving an RC Car from a PC
Found on Slashdot, this guy has onnected an RC Car to his PC and can drive it using one of those Dance Pad things. Pretty cool hack though…
This page explains how to cheaply connect a Dance Dance Revolution pad to an RC car via your PC, for literally minutes of racing enjoyment. Even more fun than the “race tracks” we played with in elementary school, where all you actually did was hold down a button and wait for your car to fall off the track.
The general approach taken here is to use the parallel port to flip the switches in the RC controller, thereby avoiding all the radio stuff. A few transistors are required to help the 3.3V parallel port pull down some pins on the 9V RC car controller.
Source code is included below… it actually just uses DirectInput to talk to the pad, so if you’re burning to drive an RC car around with your PC joystick or keyboard, that works too. If you’re using this approach, the software also tries to pulse the pins on the parallel port to give you some crude analog speed control.
Of course what I’d really like to do is connect up a normal RC receiver to my PC, but thats another story.