This project was made on a rainy weekend, I was showing Trackmania to my 5 years boy and while he was trying to play the game, he was actually struggling with the keys, so I had the idea of hacking an old remote control of a broken toy.
Just hooked an Arduino Leonardo to the steering wheel and throttle sticks and assigned key strokes for TrackMania. For the ones who don’t know trackmania, its a free racing game and very cool to play with, I should say very addictive too!
27-August-2009 UPDATE:
My friend Gerhard from Germany asked me to build a walkthrough regarding the G-Remote, with part list, schematics and code. And here it is. Enjoy :D
This is my first attempt to make a custom remote controller, and also my first customized Arduino.
After seeing this post made by OddBot I wanted to try to make one myself.
I figured out that if I purchased one remote controller it would be cheaper than buying two of these and paying shipment to Portugal.
So, ripping the guts from a game remote controller I get two joysticks, a couple of buttons, two nice motors and one small lcd.
Each joystick have one button inside, that is cool :-)
Now I have more control over my bots, specially the ones with two motors.. will post videos later.
This came up with the need of having the arduino permanently installed on the robots, I´m tired of having to remove the arduino from one bot to the other, and then rewire everything, and then reupload the code everytime I have a new idea, or everytime I want to show the bot to someone.
So I followed the ITP Physical Computing tutorial, and it works like a charm, now I want to try to upload code with the FTDI cable, and If I have success on this I can start making my custom Arduino boards. :D
And here´s the trick to upload code without having to remove the chip to a normal Arduino board, and then put it back on the breadboard, I´m using an FTDI cable, Black and Red connect to GND and +V, he RX from the FTDI cable goes to the AVR’s TX (pin3) and the FTDI’s TX goes to AVR’s RX (pin2).
“I hold down the reset button, press the upload button, count to three, then release the reset button. Then the IDE seems to upload the smoothest.” Full credits to Rudolph for sharing the trick.
Another mighty trick is using a 0.01 uf cap between the RTS (green wire) and reset pin, it will make an auto reset before uploading!!! I´ve made my day!! :D Thank you Rory ;)
