[antihero]

Weirdly, I did a project like this at uni, except we used an Xbox 360 controller to control the car, and I think more interestingly, we used MiWi (PIC chip wireless subset) to communicate with the car.

Whereas other teams sent a packet every time they did an "update" (they were using keyboard not 360 controllers), this meant there was a lot of lag as the link was limited to 500 bytes/sec, and sending a package irregularly meant lots of overhead.

What I did instead was I engineered it so we constantly sent (and received) a packet 40x a second, and this meant our updates were far less laggy and much more consistent. We just had a couple of bytes for the steering, a couple of bytes for the acceleration, and some other "flag" bits to determine what data should be sent back (reading off all the sensors at once leads to blocking).

We also had an accelerometer in the RC car, which I mapped (roughly) onto the 360 pad's force feedback, so you could "feel" what the RC was feeling.

The fact that we used miwi meant that we could control the thing over IP which was cool.

Great fun, we won too! I'm just sad that because our code was in a Dropbox shared folder, some idiot has deleted it.