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As an Assistant Professor, I'm teaching Symbian OS at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria. My company "Mopius" is developing mobile software with a special focus on Symbian OS.

ShakerRacer: Real RC car controlled with the N95 acceleration sensor

mopius | 27 November, 2007 21:34

Since the API to read the data of the acceleration sensor of the N95 has been released a short time ago, a lot of applications using it have been released. Some examples are the original moving ball-application from Nokia, the light sabre or Accelerinvaders. It’s finally possible to reach a bigger target audience than a few months ago when we released CarMeter and gBoarder, which were only supported by the Nokia 5500 Sport.

ShakerRacer: Control a real car in a natural way by tilting your phone!
Control a real car in a natural way by tilting your phone!
Now we wanted to take the acceleration sensor of a mobile phone to the next level and use it to control something literally “bigger” than an application that is running on the phone itself.

The result is called “ShakerRacer” (thanks to Adam Montandon for this great name!). Stephan Selinger, one of our professors, bought a normal RC car for about €90 and “tuned” it. Not in the traditional way, but instead he replaced the standard remote control component with an own microcontroller and a Bluetooth-module.

Using the Python module aXYZ from cyke64, it was possible to write a small application that translates the movements of the N95 acceleration sensor to commands that can be understood by the car. This enables you to go as fast as 30 km/h by just tilting your phone!

It is a bit similar to the control scheme of games like Excite Truck for the Nintendo Wii, with the huge difference that it’s now in real life. Another idea that has a bit in common is GroundSurf where a skateboard can either be controlled by your own movements (like the Segway) or with a PDA through a Bluetooth connection – but through the stylus on a touch screen and not intuitively like it is possible with acceleration sensors.

Of course connecting the tile of the phone with a real toy car involves you as a player a lot more than the traditional controller ever could, making it a lot of fun!

If you’d like to see it in action, check out the short video that we have made available at YouTube. Enjoy! As usual, you can find more information at symbianresources.com.

 James Bond would have loved it... 

 

Entertainment, Games, Python | Permalink | Comments (24) | Trackbacks (0)

 
 
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