Arceus-4G

Arceus-4G is a remote-controlled car that carries a 4G modem instead of a radio receiver. It talks directly to the driver's PC over the internet, so the only ceiling left is cell coverage.

Range is the wrong problem

Every RC car hits the same wall: the controller and the car have to hear each other. Better antennas and more power push that wall further out, but it is still a wall and it still ends at line of sight. Arceus removes it instead of moving it — if the car has a mobile connection and the driver has an internet connection, the two can find each other, whether they are on the same street or different continents.

The interesting engineering is not in the chassis. It is getting two devices that both sit behind carrier-grade NAT to talk to each other directly.

Punching through the carrier

Mobile networks put subscribers behind carrier-grade NAT: no public address, and nothing outside can open a connection to you. The usual fix is to relay everything through a server in the middle, which costs money and adds latency to every single frame.

Arceus does not. Both ends check in with a lightweight rendezvous service that does exactly one job — swap the public IP and port each side appears as from the outside. It never carries video or control traffic. Knowing each other's addresses, both ends then open the path directly, and everything after that is peer to peer.

My side of it

Hardware and electronics: the chassis electronics, power, and the physical packaging that has to keep a modem, compute and a camera alive on something that gets thrown around. Andreas did the networking stack.

A joint project, like Ligmax and Mobula. There is a fuller technical write-up on dialga.no.