RC Central

One desktop app to install and launch all your radio-controlled (RC) drift car setup tools — servo programmers, ESC configuration software, and radio utilities. Pick a tool from the catalog, click Install, click Launch. No hunting through vendor download pages. It also bundles a gearing calculator, a drift tuning guide, and a car garage for tracking your setups.

Status: beta. The catalog covers 34 entries: 19 installable tools — servo programmers (Rêve D, AGFRC, KO Propo, Yokomo, Power HD), ESC suites (Hobbywing, SkyRC, Acuvance, G-Force, KO Propo, LRP), gyro (Futaba GYD560) and radio tools (FlySky, EdgeTX Companion, Sanwa, KO Propo EX-NEXT / EX-RR) — plus 15 reference cards for drift gear that has no PC software at all, covering servos and gyros (Sanwa PGS and SGS-02, Futaba GYD550, Yokomo DP-302, SRT D1S, Rêve D REVOX, Onisiki, KO Propo RSX4S), ESCs programmed from a phone or program card (Rêve D ELITE, Yokomo RPX) and chassis build manuals (Yokomo YD-2/SD/RD, MST RMX/FXX, Overdose GALM/Divall, Rêve D RDX, Onisiki Kodama).

Download

Grab the latest binary from the releases page — pick RCCentral-windows-x64.exe unless you know you have an ARM64 machine. There's no installer; it's a single exe you can put wherever you like and delete when you're done.

Windows will warn you the first time. You'll see "Windows protected your PC" — click More info → Run anyway. That warning means the app isn't signed with a paid code-signing certificate, not that anything is wrong with it. Certificates cost a few hundred dollars a year, which is hard to justify for a free hobby project until it has more users. Every release is built in public by GitHub Actions from the source in this repo, so you can read exactly what went into the binary you're running.

If you'd rather verify than trust, every release ships a .sha256 next to each binary:

certutil -hashfile RCCentral-windows-x64.exe SHA256

Compare that against the matching .sha256 file. Releases also carry an Ed25519 .sig, which the app checks automatically before it ever applies an update to itself.

Run from source

uv sync
uv run python -m app.main

Tests: uv run pytest

How it works

RC Central never re-hosts vendor software. The catalog is a set of JSON manifests pointing at each vendor's official download URL. The app downloads straight from the vendor, unzips to the per-user data directory (%LOCALAPPDATA%\RCCentral\tools\ on Windows, ~/.local/share/RCCentral/tools/ on Linux), and launches the tool — the same model as Ninite and Scoop.

Already have a tool downloaded? Use the action button's dropdown → Locate existing install…, point it at the exe, and enter the version — RC Central tracks and launches your copy without re-downloading it.

Beyond the launcher

• Manuals — official manual and support links for every catalog entry, cross-platform, including chassis build guides for the common drift kits. PDF manuals open in a built-in viewer.
• Workshop — Garage, Gearing, and Tuning in one tab, all sharing the active car picked in its header:
  • Garage — car profiles with specs, gearing, and a run/maintenance log; compare two cars side by side, named gearing presets, JSON import/export, one-click backup/restore. Spec fields suggest real drift parts, and picking a chassis pre-fills its vendor-documented drive ratio. The chassis setup panel is a top-down car diagram with each value anchored to its spot on the car — saved base setups, named presets, factory settings for known chassis (taken from the vendor manuals), and every change logged with a timestamp.
  • Gearing — rollout/ratio math, reverse solve (target rollout or target FDR → pinion), an inline gear-ratio chart, and a pinion what-if table.
  • Tuning — drift chassis tuning chart with per-setting explainers, a shock-oil conversion table, a gyro guide, and a per-car tuning log.
• Self-update — checks GitHub Releases on startup (toggle in Settings) and swaps in the new build on exit.
• Dark & light themes with a customizable accent colour, and a built-in log viewer, under the Settings tab.

Supported platforms

Prebuilt binaries are released for Windows x64, Windows ARM64, and Linux x64. The Workshop (Garage, Gearing, Tuning) and Manuals are fully cross-platform; the Tools tab (which installs and launches vendor programmer software) is Windows-only, since that software ships as Windows executables — on Windows on ARM they run under the OS's x86/x64 emulation. On Linux the Tools tab is hidden and RC Central is the Workshop and Manuals.

Adding a tool to the catalog

1. Copy catalog/tools/reved-rs-st-pro.json as a template.
2. Fill in the vendor's official download URL (never a mirror), version, and the exe name inside the archive. Validate against catalog/schema.json.
3. Open a PR — CI validates the schema and checks the URL is alive.

For vendors

We only link to your official downloads and send users to your site. If you'd like an entry changed or removed, open an issue and we'll handle it promptly.

Privacy policy

RC Central does not transfer any information to other networked systems unless requested by the user or the person operating it. Its only network activity is:

• checking GitHub Releases for app updates on startup (can be disabled in Settings),
• fetching the community tool catalog from this repository on GitHub,
• downloading tools from official vendor URLs when you click Install.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Catalog data (URLs, versions) is factual metadata.