Control a vex with a laptop?

[dtengineering]

Well, I happen to think you're on to a great idea here... mainly because I've got something pretty similar running on my VEX bot right now. It carries the laptop around, has a webcam mounted to a servo on the arm, and connects over wifi using Skype.

I have lots of fun driving the robot from another room using the live video feed and have been waiting to fix up a few little things before posting the video link here.

Then I was going to ask a question similar to yours, but a bit different... Does anyone have any suggestions on how to interface the laptop on the robot to the rest of the internet, so that I can control the data feed down the serial port TO the robot using any computer on the planet?

Skype will take care of the video feedback for the operator... I just need to get data... preferably from a joystick but I'll settle fo the keyboard or mouse for now... across a few firewalls and down a serial port.

And that is something I could do with a few suggestions on how to implement!

Jason