Games » Raspberry Pi Car (prototype, 2021 - 2022)

I wanted to do something with the Raspberry Pi for quite some time, and at some point during the pandemic I realized that building a remotely controlled Lego car (remotely as in "over the internet") would be a cool project that I could share even with everyone stuck at home. Not knowing much about the electrical side of things I used a book as a starting point, but quickly deviated from the described approach on the software side. Coming from a game networking background I wanted something that felt as much like a proper game as possible, which poses an interesting optimization challenge when there is no way to hide the network latency by using client prediction or similar methods. This project also marks my first dive into video compression.

In the end the car could be reasonably driven by some friends from the safety of their home, with a lot of additional features not presented in the book (remotely controlled lights, a status display and a mobile version of the controller application).