I’ve seen many bots for Twitch and obviously also Slack and others. What’s been fascinating to me was the connection between the virtual and the physical.

I have been streaming myself coding on Twitch for a couple of months now, it has been a great experience and I feel it has a real impact on people.

I really wanted to create a game that can be controlled by the chat and have a physical aspect.

The idea that popped into my mind is to build a car that can be controlled using chat commands like F , R , L , B , FL etc…

The idea was to build the entire thing live on the stream, showing the viewers how the project is becoming a reality. From the architecture and planning and up until the car actually drives around the room.

First, lets start with what you need in order to make it happen:

Raspberry Pi 3

(2 if you want the car to stream video)

The Pi is the main component in this project. It will send the signals to the car’s remote control and will “host” the Node.js Twitch listener.

Optocouplers

Optocouplers are needed to connect the circuit to the Pi and make sure the right current is passing through.

Wires

You’ll need quite a few of these. You will need the male-female and male-male for the on-board connections.

Car

This is the exact car I used to build this project.

Taking the remote apart and making the connections was extremely easy to figure out and do.

The remote has no throttle it’s on/off so it’s easy to pass the signal from the Pi.

Also the car is just slow enough to take control of without it going too much out of hand.

SD card

You will need an SD card for the Pi to run.

If you are going to be streaming video from the car, you will need to actually buy two of each. 2x Pi 2x sd card.

External source of power

If you plan to run a second Pi on the car with streaming video, you will need a power source.

This one works amazingly well with the Pi and I had it run for over an hour with no issues.

Pi Camera

This camera streams HD video to the Pi and you can stream that to an external source pretty easily.

Again, this part is optional, only if you want to stream the video from the car to your computer.

More tools:

You will need a soldering iron and some soldering wire in order to connect the wires to the remote control connections.

Also, you will need a breadboard to put the optocouplers and the wires on.

You can find these anywhere, I did not find the need to put links and pictures of them here.

Some pictures of the car/connections and stages of the build:

Taking the remote apart