Radio Control

Of all the ways to catastrophically break a Sega Rally Championship Arcade cabinet, Artica's hack at Portuguese hackathon Codebits earlier this month must surely go down as the most creative. With the addition of an Arduino board and an XBee RF module, the cabinet was made to race two camera-equipped radio-control trucks around the floor at Codebits VI.  Read More

Giant-scale model cars (and airplanes) powered by small gasoline engines have been popular with adult racers for quite a few years now. The largest scale models available through conventional RC hobby outlets are one-fifth or one-sixth scale, but the serious racers go quarter-scale. Now the smallest (quarter-scale) blown V8 gasoline engine in commercial production is being turned out by Conley Precision Engines to power.  Read More

Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, are one of the largest sources of coalition casualties in Iraq. Many of these IEDs take the form of roadside bombs, which are hidden on or alongside a road, then detonated when a moving vehicle passes near them. While there is more than one way of causing these bombs to detonate, they are often set off by a hidden human observer, using a radio-control device. Forces using the new Vehicle Protection Jammer from EADS subsidiary Cassidian, however, should find themselves at a greatly-reduced risk of such attacks.  Read More

The Traxxas XO-1 is an all-wheel-drive electric car with a claimed top speed of over 100 mph (161 km/h). Not impressed? Oh yeah, it's also only 27 inches (68.6 cm) long, and weighs 10.3 pounds (4.67 kg) with batteries. The one-seventh scale radio-controlled model is billed as "the world's fastest ready-to-race radio-controlled supercar." This thing clearly isn't designed for use on the living room floor ... or on neighborhood roads.  Read More

Part of flying radio-controlled model airplanes involves using big, expensive handheld control units. In the same way that iPhones are taking the place of things like debit machines, cycling computers and meat thermometers, however, a new iPhone/iPod touch system could also make such controllers ... well, perhaps not a thing of the past, but no longer a necessity, either. It's called iPhly, and it's just about to hit the market.  Read More

As anyone who has seen Back to the Future will remember, the movie ended with Doc Brown fueling the time-traveling DeLorean’s “Mr. Fusion” reactor with household waste. Well, a student and a professor from the School of Industrial and Aeronautic Engineering at Barcelona’s Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) have taken a step towards making that scenario a reality by adapting a radio-controlled model car to run on hydrogen fuel derived from waste aluminum and water. In a nod to the movie, they have named the car the dAlh2Orean ... as in, d-aluminum-water-rean.  Read More

If you’re into R/C vehicles, there’s just the slightest chance that you might be interested in a power train that runs three to four times longer than regular battery-only systems, and that requires nothing but sunlight and water to recharge. It also educates people on what will likely be the power system of choice for future real-size automobiles... and oh yes, it looks dead sexy, in a Doc-Brown’s-Delorean-flux-capacitor kinda way. Without any further ado, please open your wallets for H-Cell 2.0, the latest miniature hydrogen fuel cell hybrid drive train from Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies.  Read More

Autonomous helicopters offer a highly maneuverable and versatile platform in scenarios like disaster relief operations, but programming these machines to perform complex aerobatics is a formidable challenge - unless of course they teach themselves. This example developed by Stanford computer scientists does just that, learning to fly by watching other RC helicopters in the air. Not only does this artificial intelligence system produce a spectacular flying exhibition, it's seen as an important demonstration of robotic learning through observation.  Read More

Late last year reports surfaced of a modified radio controlled helicopter equipped with a .45 caliber hand gun, including a video of the RC copter doing target practice with live ammunition (see below). It seems the US Army have been thinking along the same lines, except this version carries a .338 caliber sniper rifle.  Read More