Charles Palen writes in to share his RC telepresence car. By combining a remote control car, netbook, and his homebrew USB-based RC Interceptor, he was able to create a robot that could be controlled over a WiFi connection. To make it a telepresence car, he used the open source Red5 Flash server to stream video to and from the bot.
I’d like one of these to use to spy on my cat when I’m not at home. What would you do with one?
Not to discount this hack, but I did that back in 1999-2000 with an AT motherboard and pre-802 “Wavelan” ISA cards
Beast had a PC100 style power supply running off of 4 R/C car battery packs in series, plus a 5th for the drive motor. A 1st-gen Quickcam was mounted on a servo (installed that the night before flying to DC for a DARPA showoff, informally took 1st place there…) and it ran custom research streaming media software.
That streaming software’s limits were why I wrote GStreamer, the media engine used in the Palm Pre among others.