New car test through laptop

We took the new RC car for a spin with the UI and the camera. Buzz wanted to try out his own camera, which is much more expensive and better than mine, so we mounted it.

Camera mounted to car with additional rails... and tape.

 

That's a true hack job there :) TJ suggested putting rails on it between the back and front shocks. We'll get around to actually cutting them to size, tapping and screwing them, but for now they're zip tied on. Then a plastic light cover is taped between the rods, and the camera, antenna and wires are taped down everywhere :)

You can also see the JeeNode at the front. It turns out to be really easy to control both steering, and throttle with an ESC, as they both just use standard servo control. It actually saves me 2 pins compared to the other car!

View from car camera

 Buzz took it for a spin. He was determined to try to drive it under the cars parked in the space. We taped a small flashlight to the front so we could see.

Unfortunately I didn't record any video footage from this. We were also still getting used to the fast car and the controls were twitchy; with just a slightly too-long keypress, I drove the car into a pole so hard the zip-tied rails slid forward out of the rear zip ties. Buzz got it stuck under a car. I tried to drive it outside which I knew was dangerous if I lost jeenode signal and therefore control. I lost both video and control signals at once momentarily, and Buzz went to get the car. He found it trying to reverse while hard up, and making a bad electronics smell. We're not entirely sure what made the smell, and everything still works, but I think it was probably the ESC - it's the only thing that was a bit warm.

I have been aware of the danger of driving out of signal for some time, because there's nothing stopping the car from continuing if it never gets the stop command. There's no way to detect a JeeNode signal in range except to receive data. It wasn't that much of a concern with the smaller car, and I was just careful. So now I have a really compelling reason, and I've done it - if the car hasn't received a command to go forward, reverse or stop for 250ms, it stops. This also requires a change to the UI to send an update every 150ms, just to keep it going if for example you hold down forward for over 250ms, where before there would be no need to send an update.