Pretty cool, i must admit that much. but wood? you realize that wood will easily break when it's supposed to run around on wheels and stuff like that (i learned the hard way). especially not the chassis.

Wood will be just fine. It's not going to be ramming into stuff, just driving around. It's worked very well on my past robots. Besides, I can get it for free and it's easier to work with.

just a random question- why didn't you join robotics? you would've been able to get ideas from there.

I'm more interested in the electronics than the mechanics, and all the electonics comes essentially prebuilt for FIRST, which is rather boring.

Plus, it's a big commitment and you have to travel a lot.

about the phone- try a joystick or R/C controller.

The real beauty of this design is that because its driven by DTMF tones, I can use any interface I want. There are several inexpensive DTMF generator ICs out there, or alternatively any computer can be easily programmed to send DTMF tones via line-out to a transmitter. So switching to another kind of controller would be really easy.

But for now, using a phone as the actual controller is by far the easiest implimentation.

unless you're really good at text messaging or something like that. It will most likely take a lot of patience to go right, left, etc.

Uhm, it has nothing to do with text messaging.

As it is right now, I would press 2 to go forward, 5 to go back, 4 to go left and 6 to go right, like in the picture. Very simple, much like the arrow keys on your keyboard. Plus, it's quite portable, and the range is very decent (~200 feet). And it has room to grow. At this point, I see no need to change it.