Alright, folks have been asking me a bit about this “3g racing” thing I tinkered with a while back. So, I figured I’d share the story. Wasn’t anything super groundbreaking, you know, just me messing around in the shed, pretty much.
How This Whole Thing Kicked Off
It all began when I was clearing out some old boxes. Found a couple of ancient 3G phones. We’re talking proper old school, the ones with tiny screens and those clicky buttons. Most people would just chuck ’em, right? But I got to thinking, these old dogs could still, technically, connect to a network. A very slow, very unreliable network, but still. The idea sort of popped into my head: could I use these dinosaurs for something… active?
And that’s where the “racing” bit came in. Not video game racing on the phone screens, no, that’d be too easy, and frankly, the screens were too rubbish. I had this daft idea: what if I could control actual, physical little toy cars using these old 3G phones as remote controls? Over that creaky 3G connection? Just to see if it could even be done. A bit of a daft challenge, really.
Getting My Hands Dirty: The Setup
First things first, I needed some wheels. I wasn’t about to splash out, so I grabbed a couple of super cheap RC cars. The kind you get for kids, you know? Simple forward, back, left, right. Nothing fancy.
Then came the fiddly bit. I had to figure out how to get the phones to talk to these cars. This meant popping open the car’s own remote control. It was pretty basic electronics inside, thankfully. I just needed to bypass its radio and send my own signals for:
- Forward motion
- Steering left
- Steering right
- And, crucially, stop!
For the phones, I needed to make a really, really simple app. Like, painfully simple. I dug out some ancient software development kit I think I still had on a CD-ROM somewhere. The kind that makes you appreciate modern tools. The app basically had two big buttons: one for “Go/Steer” and another for “Change Direction.” I planned to cycle through forward, left, right with one button, and the other would be the accelerator. Primitive, I know!
The 3G Struggle Was Real
Okay, so building the bits was one thing. Getting it to work over 3G? That was the real beast. We’re talking serious lag. I’d hit the “Go” button on the phone, and maybe, just maybe, a second or two later, the car would lurch forward. Sometimes it would just sit there, mocking me.
Dropped connections were my constant companion. The car would be trundling along, then just die mid-track because the phone lost its already tenuous 3G signal. It was infuriating! I spent ages trying to make the command signals as tiny as possible. We’re talking sending the absolute minimum amount of data to tell the car what to do. Every byte counted.
I remember one evening, I must have spent three hours just trying to get one car to reliably make a single turn around a chair leg. My partner thought I’d finally lost it, hunched over these old phones and toy cars, muttering to myself.
So, What Was The Point?
Honestly? There wasn’t a massive grand plan. It wasn’t going to change the world. But I actually got it to work! Sort of. I had a few glorious moments where I could, very slowly and with many false starts, navigate a car across the living room floor using nothing but an old 3G phone and that shaky connection. It was a clumsy, unreliable kind of remote control racing, but it was my clumsy, unreliable remote control racing.
What did I learn? Well, it really hammered home how amazing modern mobile networks are. We complain about 4G or 5G sometimes, but man, trying to do anything real-time over 3G was a proper lesson in patience and creative cursing. It also reminded me that sometimes, the most fun projects are the ones that don’t really have a serious purpose. Just tinkering for the sake of tinkering, you know? Using old junk to make something new, even if it’s a bit daft. That’s the good stuff.
