[Michael Brumlow] found us and sent us a link. Within a few seconds, we were driving a webcam-enabled Nerf dart tank through his office and trying not to hit walls or get stepped on by his co-workers. Unfortunately, it was out of darts at the time, but you can find them all over the floor if you scout around.
All of the code details, including the link where you can test drive it yourself, are up on [Michael]’s GitHub. The brains are an Intel Edison board, and the brawns are supplied by an Arduino motor controller shield and (for the latest version) a chassis bought from China.
It runs fairly smoothly, considering the long round trip from [Michael]’s office in Texas, through wherever Amazon keeps their Web Services, over to us in Germany and back. Once we got used to the slight lag, and started using the keyboard’s arrow keys for control, we were driving around like a pro.
It’s got a few glitches still, like the camera periodically overheating and running out of WiFi distance. [Michael] said he’d try to keep it charged up and running while you give it a shot. The controls are multiplexed in the cloud, so your chance of steering it is as good as anyone else’s. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when thousands of Hackaday readers try to control it at once!
It takes a certain kind of bravery to put your telepresence robot up on the open Internets. So kudos to you, [Michael], and we hope that you manage to get some work done this week, even though you will have all of Hackaday driving into your cubicle walls.
Brb…
I think it is time for a “Twitch plays Nerf Tank”!
As the article suggests. It would be pretty interesting to see the tank controlled by hundreds/thousands users.
Big Bang theory stuff!
Give us Penny! :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1FCKpARWY8
Oh ya it’s right in their wheelhouse.
Yeah but take a look at the different ones on his Github page. One of them is that Edison board wearing a BoeBot Shield board and the tanker treads that Parallax selected for them. But what particular Nerf gun did he use?
Its the top part of a Nerf Combat Creatures TerraDrone. I plan to add a camera and web control to the bottom half at some point. It will be creepy because it walks.
@mbrumlow,
Do you have a complete build list? I want to build one minus the nerf gun.
Okay. But I was thrilled to see a BOE Bot Shield being used at one point, even with the tracks that they (Parallax) selected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwCSBFoYGw
How about we combine the two?
Brilliant! We’ve been thinking of building one of these (dart collectors) for years… Now if we just had a hopper-fed nerf gun, with a collector that drops them in… (co-worker of mbrumlow who is tired of walking on nerf-darts)
Nice to drive a robot in a distant universe ;)
My bots only transmit a sequence of images instead of a video stream and you can’t shoot darts, but they are online for several years now:
http://www.RoboSpatium.de
A rover transmitting a video stream in under construction…
Awesome! Fun stuff!
Does there need to be a public list of video-cam enabled rovers? I wonder how many others are out there?
Would be interested in that list, too. There are some webcam lists, but I found none for mobile webcams.
I remember there being something vaguely similar, where there was a live feed of a college dorm room where the students who set it up worked on stuff, and you could control the camera angle from left to right with a slider beneath the video.