I am a Computer Science student and track athlete. With COVID cancelling all my track and field distance races, I have been doing solo races on the track and it just sucks. I just finished a EE class on Embedded Systems, though so I have been thinking about what I would need to make an RC Car pacer, so that it sucks less. I know that making an LED rope around the track would be simpler, but I think this sounds like fun to make. Anyway, so far I know I need:

• An RC car
  
• a Raspberry Pi ( Have 2 already )
  
• infrared/photoreceptive sensors ( I think I have 1 already lying around, but likely need two ) to detect the white lines on the track against the black surface
  
• 2.4 Ghz Transmitter and Receiver ( or which ever Frequency range is used by the RC Car that I end up purchasing
  
• Possibly need a second RPi or just a small ardunio board to send line sensor data back to the main Raspberry Pi.
  

I do not have tools or experience with any kind of soldering, so I would like to use the RC Car out of the box as much as possible with the exception of adding those line sensors and attaching a board to send back the sensor data. I am very comfortable with any programming, like Python or C, but I could do most any language. So then my current plan is

1. Buy a 2.4 GHz RC car that can go fast enough.
   
2. Buy a set of 2.4 GHz transmitter/receiver.
   
3. Turn on RC Remote and send control signals ( press throttle, turn wheel )
   
4. Use the extra receiver to capture what those control signals look like.
   
5. Send replicated signals from the Raspberry Pi with the extra transmitter to the RC Car, so that I have control over the RC Car with some kind of software (either C or Python)
   
6. Software does its thing and I can set on top of a white lane line and tell it to follow the line at a certain speed.
   
7. Race the car and try not to step on it.
   

Does this plan makes sense? Are there any obvious flaws? I'm mostly worried that the transmitters and receivers don't work in reality like I think they will or that different brands of transmitters/receivers wont communicate properly. Another concern is that bouncing around the line on the curves will make the speed of the car unpredictably imprecise making it bad at pacing correctly.


Thanks for any thoughts or help!