Drifting an RC Car with Computer Control and a HackRF

Over on Hackaday we’ve seen a post showing how HackRF experimenter Thomas was able to control his radio controlled car with a HackRF. With some simple control curves programmed in, he is then able to use the computer and HackRF to create the perfect drift maneuver with the car.

Watson has uploaded the code to GitHub under the name monster-drift. The code is based on Node.js which is an event-driven JavaScript programming environment. The software allows you use a HackRF to control any radio controlled car that uses a simple On-Off Keying (OOK) protocol and which operates at a frequency of 27 MHz. Most cheap RC cars do use this frequency and protocol, but high-end models may use something a little more sophisticated. Some information about the protocol implementation is given here. We look forward to hopefully seeing interesting projects like remotely controlled autonomous RC cars in the future.