RC Telemetry Board Lets Virtual Crewmember Help You Race Better

July 30, 2026 by Donald Papp 3 Comments

Logging and telemetry in remote controlled racing is a great thing, and not only does [jwachlin]’s Open RC Spotter do a fantastic job of that, it has quite a few clever tricks up its sleeve that make it extra special.

Open RC Spotter is an ESP32-based hardware platform for high performance RC car racing that reads from various sensors (including IMU, GPS, temperature, battery, and IR receiver for IR lap beacons) to create a filtered stream of readings that include position, velocity, lap time, battery voltage, and more.

Got RC car telemetry? Feed it to a virtual race engineer for real-time feedback.

This data gets logged to an SD card, but can also be broadcast wirelessly via ESP-NOW to a receiver that can in turn send it over serial USB, or do whatever else one wishes. There’s also a neat feature that fires up a temporary WiFi access point on demand so log files can be downloaded with a web browser, no need to hook up a cable.

So far, so cool. But there’s still another nifty feature. [Update: originally the project had a link to the sim racing companion application Crew Chief. The developer clarified that at this writing, Open RC Spotter only supports its own Open RC Crew Chief application and not the similarly-named Windows sim racing assistant.] Open RC Spotter supports the Crew Chief telemetry protocol. Crew Chief is a piece of free Windows software that serves as a companion application for sim racing. It acts as a virtual race crew member, providing spoken information based on live telemetry read from supported racing sims.

Since Open RC Spotter supports the same telemetry format, one can use the virtual race engineer with RC car racing by simply feeding Open RC Spotter‘s serial data to the Crew Chief application. The RC telemetry data isn’t as rich as what comes from the racing sim APIs, but it’s more than enough to be useful.

People come up with all kinds of neat ideas when it comes to RC racing, and most of them depend on having access to good data. For example, a load cell in the steering mechanism can provides the data for force-feedback steering. We’ve even seen LiDAR and a depth camera used to automatically compute optimal racing lines.

Building A Big RC Mini Truck

April 16, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 3 Comments

Kei trucks are some of the smallest commercial vehicles out on the roads today. You can also get lots of cute kei RC cars if you’re into the toy side of things. [Victor] wanted to split the difference with Truck-Kun, and built a 1:3 scale kei truck to show off at a recent anime convention.

The truck is modelled on the Suzuki Carry.

The build started with a classic hacker favorite—a bunch of old hoverboard motors. These brushless hub motors are pretty easy to drive and have plenty of torque right out of the box. A simple ladder frame was whipped up with a hoverboard wheel at each corner, with a body whipped up out of cardboard, paint, and a few 3D printed parts to hold everything together.

Steering was courtesy of a leadscrew and stepper motor from an old 3D printer. RP2040s were thrown in to talk to the motor controllers, while an ESP32-S3 was charged with communicating with an Xbox One controller to receive directional commands.

It was a neat build that stood tall over most any other kei RC car at Anime Los Angeles. Only, it ended in tears when the 100-pound machine accidentally drove at full throttle into a wall and smashed itself to pieces. Still, that’s just an excuse for [Victor] to build a better one for next year.

We love a good RC build around these parts, and we love kei trucks too.

Adding Automatic Emergency Braking To An RC Car

July 2, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 1 Comment

Modern RC cars can be pretty darn fast. That’s fun and all, but it also makes it easy to crash them into things. This problem inspired [Narrow Studios] to whip up something to offer a bit of protection.

The concept is simple enough—the RC car just needs some way to detect obstacles and stop before hitting them. The build relies on ultrasonic sensors as rangefinders to spot solid objects in the path of the vehicle. An Arduino Nano is in charge of reading the sensors. When it appears the car is approaching a wall or similar obstacle, it fires off a PWM signal to the car’s motor controller commanding it to brake. The additional hardware is held to the car with a bunch of custom printed brackets.

The setup isn’t perfect; the video notes that if you insist on accelerating quickly when close to a wall, you still have a fair chance of hitting it. That’s largely put down to the refresh time of the sensors and the overall system, which could be improved with further work. Still, if you’re always crashing your RC car into walls or curbs, this kind of thing might appeal to you.

We’ve featured some other great RC projects before, too.

Continue reading “Adding Automatic Emergency Braking To An RC Car” →

3D Printing A Capable RC Car

June 2, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 6 Comments

You can buy all sorts of RC cars off the shelf, but doing so won’t teach you a whole lot. Alternatively, you could follow [TRDB]’s example, and design your own from scratch.

The Lizard, as it is known, is a fun little RC car. It’s got a vaguely Formula 1-inspired aesthetic, and looks fetching with the aid of two-tone 3D printed parts. It’s designed for speed and handling, with a rear-wheel-drive layout and sprung suspension at all four corners to soak up the bumps. The majority of the vehicle is 3D printed in PETG, including the body and the gearbox and differential. However, some suspension components are made in TPU for greater flexibility and resistance to impact. [TRDB] specified commercial off-the-shelf wheels to provide good grip that couldn’t easily be achieved with 3D-printed tires. An ESP32 is responsible for receiving commands from [TRDB’s] custom RC controller running the same microcontroller. It sends commands to the speed controller that runs the Lizard’s brushed DC motor from a 3S lithium-polymer battery.

The final product looks sleek and handles well. It also achieved a GPS-verified top speed of 48 km/h as per [TRDB’s] testing. We’ve seen some other great DIY RC cars over the years, too, like this example that focuses on performance fundamentals. Video after the break.

Continue reading “3D Printing A Capable RC Car” →

3D-Printed RC Car Focuses On Performance Fundamentals

January 20, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 8 Comments

There are a huge number of manufacturers building awesome radio-controlled cars these days. However, sometimes you just have to go your own way. That’s what [snamle] did with this awesome 3D-printed RC car—and the results are impressive.

This build didn’t just aim to build something that looked vaguely car-like and whizzed around on the ground. Instead, it was intended to give [snamle] the opporunity to explore the world of vehicle dynamics—learning about weight distribution, suspension geometry, and so many other factors—and how these all feed into the handling of a vehicle. The RC side of things is all pretty straightforward—transmitter, receiver, servos, motors, and a differential were all off-the-shelf. But the chassis design, the steering, and suspension are all bespoke—designed by [snamle] to create a car with good on-road handling and grip.

It’s a small scale testbed, to be sure. Regardless, there’s no better way to learn about how a vehicle works on a real, physical level—you can’t beat building one with your own two hands and figuring out how it works.

It’s true, we see a lot of 3D printed RC cars around these parts. Many are built with an eye to robotics experimentation or simply as a learning exercise. This one stands out for its focus on handling and performance, and of course that nicely-designed suspension system. Video after the break.

Continue reading “3D-Printed RC Car Focuses On Performance Fundamentals” →

Trying To Shatter The World’s Fastest RC Car Record

December 10, 2024 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

The RC car is controlled via an FPV setup. (Credit: Luke Bell, YouTube)

Fresh off a world record for the fastest quadcopter, [Luke Bell] decided to try his luck with something more own to earth, namely trying to tackle the world record for the fastest RC car, with the current record set at 360 km/h. Starting off with a first attempt in what will be a video series, the obvious approach seems to be to get some really powerful electric motors, a streamlined body and a disused runway to send said RC car hurtling along towards that golden medal. Of course, if it was that easy, others would have done it already.

With the quadcopter record of nearly 500 km/h which we covered previously, the challenge was in a way easier, as other than air resistance and accidental lithobraking there are no worries about ground texture, tire wear or boundary layer aerodynamics. In comparison, the RC car has to contend with all of these, with the runway’s rough tarmac surface being just one of the issues, along with making sure that the wheels would hold up to the required rotation speed. For the wheels you got options like foam, hard rubber, etc., all with their own advantages and disadvantages, mostly in terms of grip and reliability.

So far speeds of over 200 km/h are easy enough to do, with foam wheels being the preferred option. To push the RC car to 300 km/h and beyond, a lot more experimentation and trial runs will have to be performed. Pending are changes to the aerodynamic design with features also commonly seen in F1 race cars such as downforce spoilers, diffusers and other tricks which should prevent the RC car from (briefly) becoming an RC airplane.

Continue reading “Trying To Shatter The World’s Fastest RC Car Record” →

Little RC Car Project Takes Inspiration From Mario Kart

October 18, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 14 Comments

RC cars used to be pretty simple. They’d go forwards, backwards, and steer if you got a full-function toy. However, with modern technology, it’s pretty trivial to make them more advanced. [Stuck at Prototype] demonstrates that nicely with his little Micro Racer Cars.

Each little RC car has its own ESP32 running the show, hooked up with a motor controller running a small DC gear motor at each wheel. Power is from a lithium-polymer battery on board the car, which is charged via USB C. 3D-printed components form the chassis and body of the vehicle. [Stuck at Prototype] set the cars up so they could be controlled via a smartphone app, or via a custom RC controller of his own design. He liked the latter solution after he realized how hard apps were to maintain. He also gave the cars a little color sensor so they could detect color patches on the ground, so they could change their behavior in turn. This was to create gameplay like Mario Kart, where hitting a color patch might make the car go fast, go slow, or spin out.

The video goes into great detail about everything these tiny tabletop racers can do. The racer cars were initially intended to be a Kickstarter funded project, but it never quite reached its goal. Instead, [Stuck at Prototype] decided to release the designs online instead, putting the relevant files on Github.

We’ve seen some other neat RC projects before, too. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Little RC Car Project Takes Inspiration From Mario Kart” →