RC Pit Companion

RC Pit Companion is a setup coach for a friend who races a 1/10 touring car and could never remember which change helped on practice days. He tells the app how the car feels — “the back steps out when I get on the power out of the hairpin” — and it picks one single change, says what to expect, and shows it on a small 3D car, so he can test it over the next few laps instead of changing three things at once.

Every change goes into a practice log with a better, same or worse verdict next to the track conditions, and the app tells him whether a lap-time difference is bigger than the usual run-to-run noise. On race day he enters the conditions and gets his saved setups ranked by how close the track was to the one he is racing. The advice comes from a table of 61 adjustments, 12 of them hand-checked and the rest still drafts, and the model never makes up a number: a guard checks its wording against the table and swaps in a plain template answer if it strays, and a question outside the notes gets a refusal, not a guess.

Everything runs on his laptop with no internet needed at the pit table: a small local model reads the sentence, plain code picks the change, and the setups, notes and logs stay in one file on his disk. The whole thing lives in the author's Hacktoberfest 2026 monorepo, which has no GitHub stars yet, and the author installed it on his friend's 2019 MacBook Pro and recorded the demo there with the Wi-Fi off.

Honest limits: there is no hosted demo, so you run it locally from the challenge folder with Node 22.13+ and Ollama — there is no installer and no phone version, because the model lagged too much in a phone browser. It is slow on the friend's old laptop, roughly 25 seconds for a full typed answer by the author's estimate, voice needs desktop Chrome plus a one-time English speech pack and was only seen working once in the demo video, and the 3D scenes are labelled schematics with exaggerated movement, not to scale.