Smart LEGO® Tracked Racer

Watch Tracked-Racer-App ↗ live.

Control your LEGO® Technic 42065 RC Tracked Racer with your Smartphone instead of using the included RC.

Features

Use a Progressive Web App as controller. Add it without further installation to your homescreen.
Use Web standard communication with WebSockets
Use cheap hardware components

Hardware listing

42065 RC Tracked Racer
A LEGO® Power Functions extension wire [8886]
Amica NodeMCU ESP8266 - Important note: Not all ESP8266 development boards are compatible with the offered motor shields. Especially the sizing of the LoLin NodeMCU V3 doesn't fit together.
ESP8266 NodeMcu V2 Motor Shield Board
An elastic band to tie up NodeMCU and MotorShield the easy way with LEGO® bricks
A bunch of wires

Pictures of hardware assembling

Plain LEGO® Technic 42065 chassis:

Assembled ESP8266 + Motorshield + LEGO® parts:

Details of ESP8266 + Motorshield + LEGO® parts:

You find further details of wiring LEGO® Power Functions for example here.

TODO further details

Controller in Html5 & Css3

I tried various controller versions with the idea of using motion control abilities of my smartphone to control the vehicle:

Technically motion control works perfectly. - But in practise it was very unhandy for controlling the vehicle.

Finally the winner looks plain simpler:

JSFiddle - Latest JSFiddle Version

Build and run

Build Web-App with Polymer 3.0

Prerequisition: Polymer CLI

Install all dependencies - Go to folder tracked-racer-app:

$ polymer install

Test app locally in your browser.

$ polymer serve --open

Note: By design this app runs locally on ESP8266 and depends on a WebSocket served by the WebServer of the ESP. For production adjust the WS endpoint.

Prepare for production

$ polymer build

Upload app to ESP8266

Finally upload app from ESP8266/data/www folder to your ESP8266. Go to Arduino IDE Tools > ESP8266 Sketch Data Upload

Note: Close Serial Monitor of Arduino IDE before uploading data. Otherwise upload will interrupt.

Compile & upload C++ code to ESP8266

Load sketch ESP8266.ino from ESP8266 folder in Arduino IDE.

Verify dependencies:

You can manage your additional includes by Arduino IDE Sketch > Include Library > Manage Libraries or you checkout dependencies yourself by git clone in your library folder of your Arduino sketchbook location.

Using git allows you to easily update all libraries at once:

ls | xargs -I{} git -C {} pull

With all dependencies provided the code should compile and is ready for upload.

Browse to http://esp8266.local/ to load the app.

hunsalz/tracked-racer