Keyboard: arrow keys or WASD to drive, Space to rev, H for the horn, E for the engine, Esc to stop.
Kids mode is on: alarms can't be changed. Stop and Snooze still work.
Record a route
Start recording, then drive as usual (buttons or wheel). The car keeps every move and its timing, up to 5 minutes, and can drive it again by itself.
Saved routes
This car's flash has no room for routes. Upload the firmware once over USB with Tools → Partition Scheme → Minimal SPIFFS (1.9MB APP with OTA): the sketch's partitions.csv then makes 768 KB of room. Settings are kept.
While a route plays, keep this page open: if it closes or loses the car for a second, the car stops. Any button you press, or Stop, takes over.
Lists
A list plays routes and other blocks one after another: the horn, the gas, a wait until you tap, a new speed, the last blocks again.
Driving
Page
Kids mode
Caps the speed and locks the settings, alarms and recordings. Driving, the horn, the engine, stopping an alarm and playing a saved route still work. The PIN turns it off.
Clock
The car keeps the time itself while it is on. The clock chip keeps it while the car is off, and the car sets the chip right every 10 minutes. On your WiFi the time also comes from the internet every hour.
0 turns the display off. A flashing alarm still lights it up.
Car
How much motor power 100% on the speed slider gives, out of 255. 170 is the default. Raise it for carpet; higher pulls more from the battery and warms the motors.
Driving revs the engine. Parked with nothing touched, it goes quiet after 3 seconds and comes back the moment you drive or press the gas. After 2 minutes it switches itself off.
The beep skips the engine sound. Hear the beep but not the engine: the firmware. Hear neither while the signal says Strong: the amplifier, its power, or the speaker wire.
Battery
Checking.
Measure the battery with a meter and type it here once: the car then reads it exactly.
Storage
WiFi
The car tries these in this order when it starts. If none of them is there, it raises its own hotspot.
Changes are used the next time the car starts. Reconnect now restarts it quietly, without the engine, to use them straight away.
From anywhere
To drive from outside home, the car connects from your WiFi to a free MQTT broker (EMQX), and the page on the web meets it there. On that page, sign in with the broker's address, user and password and the car's code.
This is the page on the web. The broker settings are changed on the car's page at home.
Open the private link in any browser and it goes straight in, no sign-in. The password is inside it: whoever has the link can drive the car, so keep it to yourself. Signing out here doesn't stop an old link; changing the broker password does.
About
Restarts in about 10 seconds and starts the engine, like plugging the battery in. The car also restarts by itself if it hangs or loses your WiFi for 30 seconds, and then comes back quietly.
Advanced
Firmware update, health
Firmware update
Firmware updates work at home only.
In Arduino IDE: Sketch → Export Compiled Binary. Pick RC_CAR_V13.ino.bin from the sketch's build folder (not the .merged.bin). The car must be stopped with no alarm ringing; it restarts quietly into the new firmware. If anything goes wrong, it keeps the one it has.