How to connect your RC transmitter to a PC and drive Flea Racers with it

Flea Racers reads any transmitter that Windows sees as a game controller. The usual way to get there is a USB simulator dongle. Ten minutes, once.

What you need

• Your transmitter. Any surface radio with a trainer port, or one whose simulator dongle talks to it wirelessly.
• A USB RC simulator dongle. The kind sold for RC car and flight simulators. It plugs into the PC's USB port and connects to the radio by trainer cable or wirelessly, and Windows sees it as a game controller with a steering axis and a throttle axis. The one on the Buy a Dongle board in the game is what Flea Racers is developed and tested on.
• A Windows PC with Chrome or Edge. Firefox works too. On a phone the game is driven with the touch stick; Android reports a dongle's steering in coarse steps, so the radio belongs on the PC.

Step by step

1. Plug the dongle in and connect the radio to it. Switch the radio on.
2. Check Windows sees it. Press the Windows key, type joy.cpl and press Enter. The dongle appears in the list. Open Properties and move the wheel and trigger: two bars should move. If nothing moves here, the game cannot see it either, so fix this first.
3. Open flearacers.com in Chrome or Edge and tap the screen or press a key once. Browsers only hand a controller to a page after the page has been touched.
4. Move the wheel. The game picks the radio up on the first movement and the bottom bar shows Radio connected.
5. Open the Radio page from the Radio button in the bottom bar. It has four parts: Channels, Calibration, Feel and Controller mapping.
6. Channels. Turn the wheel: the steering bar should move. Pull the trigger: the throttle bar should move. If the wrong bar moves, swap the channels there. If a bar moves the wrong way, reverse that channel there.
7. Calibration. Follow the prompts: full left, full right, full throttle, full brake, then let go for centre. This sets the endpoints and the centre so the car uses the whole travel of your radio and sits still with your hands off.
8. Feel. Dual rate limits how far the car steers at full lock, and dead band ignores a little jitter around centre. Both are also on the Setup page inside the game.
9. Drive. Close the page and lap. Your settings are saved on this device.

Verify it is right

• Hands off, the car rolls straight and does not creep. If it creeps, calibrate again with the trigger fully released at the centre step.
• Full lock steers the same amount both ways. If one side is short, run the calibration again and make sure you hit the endpoints.
• Turning the wheel right turns the car right on screen. If not, reverse the steering channel.

Detected but not responding right

• Nothing showing in the game but Windows sees it: click or tap the game once, then move the wheel. Browsers block controllers until the page has had a real touch.
• Windows does not see it: try another USB port, check the trainer cable is fully in, make sure the radio's trainer or simulator mode is on if it has one.
• Steering in steps or twitchy: add a little dead band on the Radio page. If you are on an Android phone, move to a PC.
• Throttle and steering swapped: swap the channels on the Radio page.
• Car goes the wrong way when you steer: reverse the steering channel on the Radio page.
• Still stuck: use Report a bug on the Setup page inside the game, or email [email protected] with the radio and dongle you have.