Put It In Your Mouth And Blow: The Breath Controlled RC Car

Yes, you read and saw that correctly, control an RC car by breathing...I guess we throw "drive-by-wire" straight out the door, huh? We're sorry...that's the best we can come up with because the only thing we're seeing is the double entendre in all this, so we're going to let the inventor, Matthew Irvine Brown, explain it with a bit less sophomoric humor:

"This is a standard remote control toy car with a mouthpiece the player blows into to control steering. The car measures controlled change – blow gradually harder and it steers to the right; blow gradually softer and it steers to the left...

... Steering/breathing instructions can be described using standard musical notation (dynamics, tempo, duration of notes, phrasing, breath marks – but no key or pitch).

[The Car] Contains a Yamaha BC3 MIDI breath controller which converts breath pressure to MIDI data. This is sent to MAX/MSP which converts MIDI to serial data. Serial data is sent via Bluetooth and PIC chip to a servo on the car which controls the steering. The forward and backward controls are hacked from a cheap 10 remote controlled toy car."

So the obvious question we've got is when this'll be available on our cars. For once we'd let a girl drive just to determine the efficacy of her technique. Sorry, it was like Charlie Brown...we just had to pull the football up...it was just too perfect an opportunity.

Head on over to Matthew's site — he's got all of the details and some great graphics on his little concept.

Hello. This is Matthew Irvine Brown's portfolio. [irvinebrown.com via Gizmodo]

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