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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 | Next | Previous | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Comments

Re: ShakerRacer is now Open Source!

croozeus | 30/01/2008, 07:03

croozeus

Congrats!
Its great that this is finally released.
However I didn't find anywhere instructions by Stephan Selinger for configuring the micro controller and Bluetooth in the Car?

Can you please provide a link to it? Or is it contained in the docs as well?

Best Regards
Croozeus

Re: ShakerRacer is now Open Source!

bogdan.galiceanu | 30/01/2008, 07:43

bogdan.galiceanu

You guys have done an excellent job in demonstrating what the accelerometer is capable of. And now it'll only get better with the source code made public.

Re: ShakerRacer is now Open Source!

mopius | 30/01/2008, 09:15

mopius

Glad to hear that you like it!

Stephan's instructions for the hardware part are contained in the documentation pdf at symbianresources.com as well.

Modifying the car unfortunately doesn't just require reconfiguring existing hardware of the RC car, but instead replacing the wireless receiver and the steering unit with an own module. Standard modules wouldn't be able to handle the Bluetooth stack and frequencies.

Best regards, Andreas

Re: ShakerRacer is now Open Source!

cyke64 | 30/01/2008, 09:56

Hello Andreas ,

Thanks for releasing source code (C for microcontroller and Python for accelerometer phones) :)

@croozeus : all explanation (schematics and steps are with the Python file NOT in the single pdf file !) So download the shakerracer.zip file

sis file (shakerracer application) is only configured for sensor API) ! For using aXYZ on older N95 firmware change use_sensor_api value (put -1 instead of 1) in the ShakerRacer.py file.

BR
Cyke64

congrats again

exoersist | 31/01/2008, 10:54

really this application is a great innovation and congrats to the developers and seems that pys60 is really aheading fast towards the embedded systems and it shows to all developers what python is capable of.
congrats to developers again.

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