Gadgetory

in previous years at LTX Jake's contribution to like incredible experiences that we've created have been playing racing games on the 16 K and 10 K ultra wide gaming setups and frankly they were Smash Hits good job Jake but this year for our racing experience we're not content to settle for bezels or even virtual cars this is next level my friends what if instead of a video game car on a screen we could drive actual cars in VR I mean yeah okay there there RC cars but like come on close enough right SiC right just like our sponsor Ridge wallet Oh Ridge wallet is the sleek way to keep wallet bulbs down with its compact frame and it offers RFID blocking inner plates use code LTTE to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping at the link below let's break this down so first we've got to figure out how to control our steering servo here with a steering wheel as well as figuring out how to control our ESC or electronic speed controller with a throttle and a brake pedal and then there's the video stuff like how do we even mount it what are we gonna use like there's a lot of questions here yeah furthermore getting that video feed to the headset is another issue so we need something that's high quality enough that you can really see where you're going through it and also low latency enough but you don't just want to immediately throw up we're probably getting ahead of ourselves a little bit though because before we can do any of that stuff we need to settle on a platform or a car there's a lot of options out there obviously but we need something that's not crazy expensive because you know you're kind of cheap we need something that's gonna be reliable with good battery life because this is gonna be seven plus hours for two days and it needs to be not too big or too fast because both of those things are gonna contribute to motion second yeah if you're like ripping around that fast like four inches from the ground we want to keep our vomit quota for lcx pretty low could it be done now of course it also still needs to be big enough to house all the first person view hardware and I mean ideally be fun to play with when we're just done this project right yeah there we go so turns out there was a bit of a miscommunication Jake and I define large a little bit differently so for better for worse we ended up with a Traxxas Slash two-wheel drive which would be perfect for this project if it was oh I don't know about 30% smaller and okay okay okay maybe about a fifth of the speed it's fun though yeah that's fine roll with this all right all right all right well one thing I didn't show you is it has training mode which cuts the throttle in half you know Jake's not so bana we're on the same wavelength here all right it's still pretty quick okay still probably a little faster than we wanted sorry David getting our steering working with the USB steering wheel was the first real challenge now we knew thanks to fellow youtuber RC sparks that there was a steering wheel that would work really well for this setup thanks to its simple design the thrust master Ferrari racing wheel and thankfully Thrustmaster was able to supply us with several of them to tinker with and it looks like with some minor modifications we should be in pretty good shape so with the RC transmitter and the steering wheel opened up this actually looks relatively straightforward ish hopefully knock on wood so the transmitter just has a potentiometer so you can see the one behind the steering wheel right here and then it's got a second one for the throttle so that's pretty cool so if the resistance is the same between this and there we go the potentiometer here and while the other one would be in the pedals we'll deal with that later we should be able to just move the wires over and yeah they're different so we're dealing with ten kilo ohm potentiometers in the steering wheel and then just five kilo yeah sorry yeah five kilo for the transmitter okay so hopefully then what we can do is find some five kilo ohm pots that are a similar size to what's already in the steering wheel because we'd rather not have to make adapters or something just to mount the pot so we can turn the stem on it when we turn the wheel after a quick trip to the local electronics store Jake returned with something reminiscent of what we previously had although we could tell some minor modifications were going to be necessary for the pedals we weren't able to locally source flat sided potentiometers in the resistance that we needed so while you could probably just drill out the hole in these little gears we decided to instead 3d prints and replacements as for the steering wheel the geometers was really close to fitting but some cutting and sanding was required to get it nice and snug in there we went with a super professional hot glue mount for now but by the time we roll this out at LTX it'll probably be upgraded to jb weld for wiring we followed along as closely as we could with our see sparks as guide and it turned out pretty well although we did have to swap our petals from left to right as they were reversed okay so theoretically if you fire that up turn three mil oh no way okay that's the easy one okay sigh you saw it definitely trying we should try the calibration thing whoa whoa wake it so what we're trying to do right now is calibrate the petals because theoretically you can set up what I guess it would be the receiver yeah the speed control you're ready yeah okay ready does already press it no no sorry well it's moving at least so we got the throw is it enough to get it to go oh not very fast this might be better though it's a little slow I feel like we have less throw than we did in the controller trigger so the ones in the control are 180 degrees right see how yeah blah blah blah and then these ones are like 270 yeah so what if we cut this just cut the stoppers out so while Jake chops up the pedal assembly it's time to talk about the first person view video setup now we browsed a ton of different tutorials and forums for information about what the best individual components were for a setup like that and the conclusion is that it's kind of like building a PC except rather than what CPU GPU and ram you should buy it's which video transmitter receiver camera antennas headset and batteries and there's a lot less community consensus on the benefits of certain parts over others so at this point it felt like throwing the company credit card at an RC shop and validating a bunch of different stuff ourselves might have been our only choice that is until we found out that DJI makes a pretty much plug and play first-person view camera called oq sync which when paired with their racing goggles supposedly provides a super low latency and high quality video feed you know I gotta say as much as I was genuinely looking forward to cobbling something together and tinkering with it given that we're gonna be running this at a live event with thousands of attendees I'm actually pretty happy that we found a premade solution one point DJI failed to mention to us however is that see this right here is the receiver and camera module it actually needs active cooling otherwise it can overheat I mean I guess that makes sense given that this thing is designed to be used on open air like racing drones but anyway it's fine because we can just simulate that airflow with a little 5 volt knock to a fan a 3d printed bracket and then some of these old Enzo tech heat sinks okay so now that Jake is pretty much done with the hack job behind me I guess it's time for me to try and find some look it's not I know it's not gonna be perfect today think about what we're gonna have to do is cut some holes in this top but so we don't maintain it for LTX we're just gonna temporarily mount it yes because LTX we want it to be very pretty and pretty is not our specialty and like think about it it's not like when you sit in your car you don't have your dash in front of the windshield like we'll be able to see well enough it's not it's gonna be like right in front Lee look I know look if I could put it up supercar something sure Oh hot glue I'm just putting little bit okay well it has a bracket you know well now it's hot glue hopefully right side up - you can flip it alright there we go that's doesn't quick that's on there no please don't hot glue that what's just a little Oh No just a DAB okay I forgive you for choosing this car that's expensive because it's not actually working pretty darn well yeah yeah easy for you to say did you pay for it no but neither did you yes I did well - Media Group Incorporated good okay so now the battery we need the battery yep I'm not gonna hot glue you at home this is a lithium polymer battery I would strongly recommend not hot gluing one of these anywhere you got to rip it off just tears the cell in half that's a massive fire yeah yeah spicy hey nice alright so the cooling fans going is it super wide angle yeah actually holy crap I can see David right now really from where you are 720p right now so this is the I think the highest quality setting it looks pretty good like the lowest latency setting you mean er no it's the highest quality well really so the highest latency okay how's your nausea I mean the fact that you're moving isn't helping but do you want to put it on the ground I want to try it alright to try this spoils with my labour where are the pedals this is gonna be kind of interesting watching me fall over okay I feel like I'm driving a Jeep like it oh man no way woah oh my gosh dude the latency is so low no so we think it's possible that we can insert an SD card right here in the occupied and record straight to this so you guys will see the full quality haha isn't it sick hey Jake what's up dude this is so awesome so cool the graphics the graphics man it's IRL man I could get like way better at this with some practice alright alright alright we can wrap this video I can go I can go do mine sure ok so there's definitely still some progress for us to make before we can deploy this at LTX but like wow this is genuinely really awesome I know that this one was a little bit sparse on the details but the truth is that this was just proof of concept we've still got some things to iron out so the next video is going to be the detailed guide for how you guys could do this with similar gear at home trying out the track and then of course we're gonna be teasing the full experience that you'll be able to have at LTX 2019 speaking of experiences my sponsor segways are an experience and a half are they not with private internet access you can hide your true IP address and you can bypass your restrictions and censorship because it makes you appear as though you are somewhere else you can use it on up to five devices at once with a single account and it's got all kinds of great features including their internet kill switch if your VPN gets disconnected involuntarily their DNS leak protection mase their own built-in malware blocker and all the different tunable --zz that you can adjust like their various levels of encryption it's available for Windows Mac Android iOS and as a Chrome extension and you can check it out at LM GGG / p IA linus - we're gonna have that linked below so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description maybe don't buy the stuff we featured in this video just yet because we still have a lot to learn but next time next time we'll be ready also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join