Installation, Testing and Comparison

Installation is easy, but you have to install the software and drivers first before hooking up the USB cable to your computer.

During the installation I did find a small problem, the instructions don’t mention that you need to restart your computer after the installation and I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working correctly. So I restarted the computer and it worked great after that. Of course you’ll need to charge the car before using which only takes a few minutes, the LED will go out to let you know it’s finished charging.

The USB RC Car can be controlled with the mouse using the graphical interface or you can use the keyboard. I found that using the cursor keys is much easier than using the mouse, you can just do things faster with the cursor keys instead of having to move the mouse and click on the direction you want to go.

The interface is actually in two parts, the main part is the steering wheel with directional buttons and a horn button in the center. There is also a little round red button that shuts it down.

The other interface is not an interface, just a status bar essentially. There is a speed bar at the top that lights up as the car moves to simulate a speedometer. Under that are three round ‘gauges’, the first indicates the battery level while charging, the second let’s you know the gear the car is in and the third lights up when you drive in reverse. The software also puts a small icon in your taskbar area as well that looks like a steering wheel.

Next up I’ve got two movies, which is actually four movies just spliced together to make two. Please make sure you have the volume turned up so you can hear the sounds of the car that come from the computer speakers. Actually the sounds get annoying after a while of using the car, I like to have ht volume down or muted when I’m playing with it. Using the car is very easy, but I did find there is about a 1 second delay from the time you push the button until the car responds to the command. So if you’re driving it near the edge you sort of need to think ahead so the car doesn’t crash, it took a few minutes to get accustomed to the delay but after that it was smooth driving…