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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 is now Open Source!

mopius | 30 January, 2008 00:33

A short summary: ShakerRacer allows you to control a real RC car with the accelerometer of the N95. This means that you can turn and accelerate simply by tilting your phone. Read more at the previous Forum Nokia blog post.

Close-up of the modded RC car for ShakerRacer.
Close-up of the modded RC car that can be controlled by the accelerometer.
We have published a video of the app in November 2007 – since then, a lot of things have happened. The video at Youtube is currently at a whopping 105,000 views. The Forum Nokia Blog entry has been read 10,000+ times. We improved the code and added several new features, e.g. a speed limit mode for demonstrating the car at exhibitions.

And we got countless emails asking for the source code.

Now it’s finally ready – we have just released the source code along with some documentation. You can download it for free at symbianresources.com! So (nearly) nothing can stop the fun anymore.

Especially with the latest version of ShakerRacer, it is very easy to control the car – and of course it’s a lot of fun. The great thing is that you don’t have to explain the concept to anyone. It’s just a natural way to drive.

We demoed ShakerRacer at an information exhibition for pupils interested at studying. Obviously, it drew a lot of attention when a small car races around on the floor and someone just tilts his phone. During the development phase, the car lost both bumpers due to some serious crashes – luckily, there was only a single small crash with one of the visitors thanks to the new speed limit mode :)

Some more information

How to control the car by tilting the mobile phone.
The most natural way to control the car turned out to be the landscape mode.
Keep in mind that the phone cannot simply connect to an out-of-the-box RC car, as the standard wireless remote control of a car uses some proprietary protocol and technology for communication. Only by adding a microcontroller + Bluetooth module, you can make the car understand Bluetooth and enable it to communicate with the phone. Stephan Selinger has written some short instructions on how to accomplish this, but it requires some hardware ownership as well as –knowledge.


The Python application now uses the official Nokia Sensor-API by default. This allows using the mobile client with the Nokia 5500, N95 (Firmware 20+), N95 8GB, N93i and the N82. For the N95 with older firmware, you can reconfigure the code to still use the very nice aXYZ Python-module from Cyke64.

Some more pictures as well as the documentation and the source code are available from symbianresources.com.

 

Connectivity, Entertainment, Games, Python | Permalink | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

3D games and more – Java ME course materials available

mopius | 16 January, 2008 15:41

A few minutes ago, the last upload was finally finished and now symbianresources.com does not only feature loads of Symbian OS-related projects and tutorials, but also the course materials of the introductory Java ME course from the Mobile Computing-department of the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria - all available for free.

The slides and challenges are targeted at students with basic knowledge of Java and introduce the specific concepts of the Java Platform, Micro Edition. With almost 400 slides/pages, they cover quite much, but of course do not go too much into specific details that wouldn't be relevant for teaching.

Some examples of the exercises, where solutions are provided with full source code:
  • A mobile 3D car racing game framework, created with JSR 184 (m3g). Includes: the first basic steps in creating your own 3D scene with Blender, an open source 3D package written in Python, and how to display this 3D scene on a mobile phone.
  • A client for a multiplayer “Asteroids”-like game (server components and game protocol were developed by my colleague Stephan Drab).
  • Your own small game, complete with an enemy, bullets, highscores and everything you want from a game – well, almost everything, at least. Based on the boss fights of Schlabo 1, a text mode game that I wrote in QuickBasic at school many years ago.
If you’re interested, take a look at the new Java ME section at symbianresources.com.

I’ve been rather silent on the blogs lately - but now that the semester is coming to an end, you can expect more content to be released soon, including:
  1. ShakerRacer source code and hardware setup instructions
  2. Updated and improved Symbian OS course materials (@ symbianresources.com)
  3. And of course, some fascinating new student projects... I'm looking forward to the results myself :)
Some of the exercises that are part of the Java ME course materials at symbianresources.com

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