Internet Controlled Arduino WIFI Car

Using Arduino Project Guidance
1

I am trying to make a Internet controlled arduino car over wifi but there are several obstacles.

Most of the tutorial only works if the controller device (e.g laptop or smartphone) is connected to the same network, e.g let's say I am in my house but the car is in my parents house. I want to be able to control it from anywhere both of us has wifi.

Other tutorial requires to open the router's port in the network where the car is connected to. This is not feasible since my parents are halfway around the world and is not portable. E.g If my parents are visiting my relatives house, they need to open the port again in my relatives house
3G is not so reliable and expensive.

I researched about HTTP Post but it seems it would have some considerable delay? Maybe someone can help me with UDP or other protocol that would be faster?

To make things easier, I am ok with having a laptop/smartphone as the main controller and the arduino only as the motor driver via usb/bluetooth.

So having said all that, Could you please kindly help me with this?

Thank you

2

Hi. I suspect the only way to do this in all the situations you describe is to have both the car and the controller both connect to a common server elsewhere on the internet. There is a service I have used before, I will try to remember the name. It was free but may no longer be. You will still have the problem of getting the car connected to the internet wherever your parents take it. Somehow it will need to know the WiFi ssid and password for wherever it is.

Paul

3

Here it is: https://www.weaved.com/

Not sure it is what you need, but worth investigating. May be available only for RPi.

4

Hi PaulRB,

Thanks for the reply. Can you please provide me with some info on your projects using weaved? After googling and asking around, MQTT might be a good alternative. Can you please tell me what is the difference?

thank you

5

I am not an expert on either Weaved or MQTT, but I am not certain that MQTT can solve some of your problems.

I used Weaved with Raspberry Pi. I had a web server running on the Pi. But I could not access it from the internet, only from my local network. Usually this is achieved through port forwarding on your router. But this was not an option for me because my internet service was using 3G or 4G. Providers of those services do not allow incoming requests to your local network, at least not in the UK. Weaved solves that problem by providing a common server which both the Pi and the remote user can make connections, so no incoming requests needed to your local network.

Hope that made sense.