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Using Your Cellphone To Control RC Cars
rocannon writes "Cellular-news reports that NEC has announced a technical cooperation with the Japanese toy manufacturer, Konami to enable its range of MICROiR toys cars to be controlled from the DoCoMo N504iS handset or the J-N51 handset sold by J-Phone. More details on Cellular News."
Yes, but can I control those tiny tanks that were spammed to death last christmas?
"Honey, I have to hang up now, my Celica is stuck in a draingrate..."
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
That a company thinks that this is a somehow useful feature that will get people to buy their phone, or that i know that people will buy these phones for this *useful feature* to give themseleves 30 seconds of joy before losing the little car.
;)
Having said that, I want one
37 - what does it stand for really...
after most of you have a RC car for your cellphone, I'll use my phone to control your cars!!!
Bah, what do I want some silly little looking ferrari for. Gimme McLaren damn it!!
On a side note, how good are these infra red controls. In the past I have always found them to be a bit tricky to use at distance so I can see a lot of spectacular wipe outs as the cars lose signal.
Then again it does mean getting a very realistic F1 experience as you see your team/car going straight into a wall and then falling to pieces.
37 - what does it stand for really...
This is not news, James Bond was doing this years ago.
People have enough trouble just talking on their cell phones when driving. Now they'll drive their RC car off the dashboard before plowing into to rear of a semi with their real car.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Wouldn't Bluetooth be a better way of achieving this? If they were to make the cars recieve they're control via Bluetooth, any Bluetooth device (including phones) with the appropriate software could control them. This would mean your not tied into buying a particular phone for what is nothing more than a gimmick (albeit an incredibly cool gimmick). Of course I make this with no real understanding of the latency involved in Bluetooth or the cost of a reciever (although I do remember it was originally supposed to be cheap enough to embed in everything).
1. Place rc car movable plastic cup of water on shelf over brothers bed. :)
2. Place rc car on shelf.
3. Leave early.
4. Drive car into water.
5. Hilarity ensues
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
I have ended up using Salling Clicker (linked above) for more things than I thought. (keynote, turn on password protection, etc)
While controlling remote control cars may not be all that cool. (Range is horrible for those little cockroach cars) I do think it would be nice to have something like the feature integrated into Sony Clies where you can control ANY TV STEREO or CABLE BOX with just the selection of a brand name and type of device. I would love to be able to do this with my phone.
After talking to the programmer of Romeo, a similar program - I have been keeping up with developments that t68i phones will soon be able to control TV's and VCRs, and etc - through an actual "on phone program" - right now Romeo and Salling Clicker are Push based.
Does anyone know if there is an infrared to bluetooth or vice versa converter coming out?
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Great! Now all the people that can't drive and talk on a cell phone at the same time get to drive, talk and drive on a cell phone all at the same time.... I'm giving up my license now and going home.......
Money not found! A)bort, R)etry, D)eclare Bankruptcy
Countries surrounded by water? Does the isolation drive us crazy or something? The Japanese make weird gadgets The English can't cook vege's And me and my aussie mates can't speak english!
I am posting this from my cellphone whilst cruising down the interstate at 85.4 miles per hour. Weehawww........
Money not found! A)bort, R)etry, D)eclare Bankruptcy
The article doesn't mention weither you have to pay phone costs for this.. I doubt the cars have a phone number, so how does this work?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start makes your RC car have 30 lives ;)
I hear that they have a new cellphone network that allows the user to control household appliances. Is there any truth to this ?
...was playing Pong on the Berlin Alexanderplatz. It was just bizarre to stand in front of that big building and being able to control the lights of the windows with a cellphone. Too bad it is no more...
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
But, does some1 see any sense in this?
i mean it seems to be a funny toy, but rather senseless...
so long, Hoagie
who the fuck is general failure? and why is he reading my harddisk?
Allow people to control a real car with their mobilephone. This way they wouldn't need to keep one hand on the steering wheel when using their phone during driving.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
I was thinking about getting the N504iS (links are in English) but decided against it for a couple reasons. First of all, this phone is really nice. It's a clamshell style phone, like pretty much all the phones have become in Japan. It can already control most of the major brands of televisions here too. It also has a camera capable of taking 640x480 res pix. I believe the screen is also capable of display 256K colors, but I don't remember for sure. There's also a color screen on the outside of the clamshell so when you get a mail or phone call, you can have it display a picture so you know who's calling.
:p Finally, when I went to get a phone, the N504iS was recalled for some reason and I would have had to go on a waiting list for it. It's out now, but it was only re-released a month after I got my current phone... which is the F504iS.
However, even with all it's goodness, I was annoyed that the "OK/Confirm" button was above the circular "cursor" keys. I like that button being in the middle. In addition, the N504iS has Disney characters advertising it, so I didn't even want to go there.
The F504iS has 2 cameras (which I don't need) and is able to record video at 15fps max. But the real reason I got it was because of the "OK" button and cursor layout and the nice outside display. It's really easy to read and only displays what I want it to which is the time, battery life, signal strength, and if I have any mails.
- David
My other uid is a low one. That could be a bumper sticker, you know.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
I already hate people that bring their cells into theaters and classes and such. Now I might also have to deal with little toy cars running about? Are cell companies trying to get their customers shot?
The coolest voice ever.
...was to make an RC car controlled by DTMF tones hooked up by a microphone on top of the car. I would then put my mobile phone on it, set it to auto answer, and then call it to drive around.
Of course, the shielding for the audio circuts would have to be well shielded to avoid TDMA noise, but I'm sure that's simple to design around.
-- Mike
What made me think though, is how much cooler it would be if some dude hacked his phone and/or car so that the phone could control the car. For whatever reason, the idea of hacking something to do some trick is far more interesting than the engineers implementing the same trick.
Can they explode like the cars in the GTA series?
What the fuck are you talking about?
Didn't James Bond have the same concept with using his PDA/Cell Phone as a RC device for his BMW. I mean the CIA might have thought of the idea before the Bond Movie and before the developers made RC Cellphone devices for testing with small RC Cars.
Great, now we can get some fuckwit driving a remote car while he drives his real car while he tries to make a phone call and send a text message all at once.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
Figures. who else would do this?
I have seen something like this on our local fair and even got a chance to drive it with my celular phone . Whole thing was done by a few hardware guys, backed by our GSM network operator...
Just a point -- directly after you link the cell phones to the RC cars, (noting that that's 1-way data transfer), what's next?
How about, using those nice color cell-phone screens to display an image from the car?
Send it in at about 5 frames per second, 150x150. At Jpeg, that would be about 100kbaud. However, with any decent codec, you should be able to get that down by a factor of 10 or so, since the majority of the data will be changing in specific, set ways.
So now you can have real-life races from the security of your cell phone. And high-tech racing cars, too. I'm willing to bet that people would pay for that -- and it doesn't stop there, does it?
The days of the arial racing and dogfights may be coming back!
Don't sign me up, though. I need to hold down a job. I'm gonna stick this one in the same classification as Nethack: save it for Heaven; I might have enough time then. Might.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
The trend with new cellphones has been attempting to make them appeal to younger and younger kids. Turning the phones into "must have" toys for the kids means a sharp increase in an otherwise mostly saturated subscriber base.
Text messaging, for example, has been re-marketed from its original status as a business feature; "When you get out of your meeting, Joe, please call Carol at ext. 490. Urgent!" to a play-toy feature for teens.
Cameras built into cellphones? Another similar ploy. While you *might* find a few people creatively using theirs for business purposes, they generally don't have enough resolution to serve useful business purposes. (If I was in real-estate, for example, and needed lots of photos of interiors/exteriors of homes - I'd just use a digital camera so the results were better.) What they're really hoping is for the teens to pass photos back and forth of people doing stupid stuff at parties, the latest boyfriend/girlfriend pics, etc.
An R/C car remote control feature? Just another example. No, most adults will find it amusing maybe once or twice, and then never use it again (if they ever mess with that feature at all). But the pre-teens will dig it.
Cell phones are already a problem on the highway...
This would be so cool for Simon McKay from The Wizard!
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0090547
fear. Anyone remember this show?
weird, i expected something about the T68 mobile since i've
seen it controlling little rc cars at cebit 2003.
and yes, i tried it. wasn't really a great experience. but... who cares.
i even thought of stealing one of those cars...
Ok, cell driving your rc car with your cell phone. Cool. Untill it drives so far you can't see it any more. What this car needs is a real time cam that feeds back to the cell phone so you can see where it's going (and what it's seing) without being there.
:)
Now in addition to this, replace the car with a transparent stealth blimp with emp countermeasures and you have an interesting device.
Is it really necessary to have a cellphone that could control a remote control car?? It that supposed to save people time or something?? "Mom, I can't talk right now, I need to use my phone to race a remote control car." The two just do not go together, it seems uncanny and flat out pointless.
Finally there is something to use up all those useless night and weekend minutes! T-mobile mobile camera phone anyone?
I have yet to see a lens system on a consumer digicam that measures to to consumer 35mm interchangeable systems (Nikon or Leica/Voigtlander) so smaller form factor and new file transfer options are nice.
Ideally, I'd like to see a 3 MP digicam with 128 MB of buffer, a wireless network interface and fast enough logic to take 24-30 frames per second. I could stream video back to my home computer as I drive, ride my bike, or walk around the city.
The new PDA-phones are a bit smaller than the first generation, but much larger than the ultra-tiny phones. Although those phones were convenient to carry around, the buttons are hard to press, and they had poor sound quality.
Bring on the new technology. more is beter.
Get an Ericsson GH888 then. Old but the Toughest phone around. Must be about 5 or 7 years old now, but still works after it gets dropped (from 3 stories high), no stupid games or gimmicks, Good battery life. Big-ass antenna that directs radiation upwards, and it's got a key-lock.