Those little ESP32-CAM boards which mate the WiFi-enabled microcontroller with a small parallel-interface camera module have been with us for years, and while they are undeniably cool to play with, they sometimes stretch the available performance in trying to process and stream video. [Mattsroufe] has made a very cool project with one of them, not only managing to stream video from a small model car, but also to control the steering and motor by means of servos and a little motor driver.
Sadly it’s not entirely a stand-alone device, as the ESP32 streams video to a web server with some Python code to handle the controls. The server can aggregate several of them on one page though, for perhaps a little real-life quad-screen Mario Kart action if you have enough of the things. We can see that this idea has plenty of potential beyond the mere fun of driving a toy car around though, but to whet your appetite there’s a demo video below.
We’ve seen enough of the ESP32-cam before, but perhaps more as a photographic device.
Ten year ago I did something very similar with a Raspberry Pi . The purpose was checking the cats when I was not home (hence the name: the cat lurker). It was self contained and, through a VPN, usable from anywhere in the world I could go. The response time was decent enough to drive it around the house. It still works, but nowadays cheap cameras are a better option.