2024 Tiny Games Contest: Realistic Steering Wheel Joystick In Miniature

August 30, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

For racing games, flight simulators, and a few other simulation-style games, a simple controller just won’t do. You want something that looks and feels closer to the real thing. The major downsides to these more elaborate input methods is that they take up a large amount of space, requiring extra time for setup, and can be quite expensive as well. To solve both of these problems [Rahel zahir Ali] created a miniature steering wheel controller for some of his favorite games.

While there are some commercial offerings of small steering wheels integrated into an otherwise standard video game controller and a few 3D printed homebrew options, nothing really felt like a true substitute. The main design goal with this controller was to maintain the 900-degree rotation of a standard car steering wheel in a smaller size. It uses a 600P/R rotary encoder attached to a knob inside of a printed case, with two spring-loaded levers to act as a throttle and brake, as well as a standard joystick to adjust camera angle and four additional buttons. Everything is wired together with an Arduino Leonardo that sends the inputs along to the computer.

Now he’s ready to play some of his favorite games and includes some gameplay footage using this controller in the video linked below. If you’re racing vehicles other than cars and trucks, though, you might want a different type of controller for your games instead.

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Hackaday Links: August 18, 2024

August 18, 2024 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

They’re back! The San Francisco autonomous vehicle hijinks, that is, as Waymo’s fleet of driverless cars recently took up the fun new hobby of honking their horns in the wee hours of the morning. Meat-based neighbors of a Waymo parking lot in the South Market neighborhood took offense at the fleet of autonomous vehicles sounding off at 4:00 AM as they shuffled themselves around in the parking lot in a slow-motion ballet of undetermined purpose. The horn-honking is apparently by design, as the cars are programmed to tootle their horn trumpets melodiously if they detect another vehicle backing up into them. That’s understandable; we’ve tootled ourselves under these conditions, with vigor, even. But when the parking lot is full of cars that (presumably) can’t hear the honking and (also presumably) know where the other driverless vehicles are as well as their intent, what’s the point? Luckily, Waymo is on the case, as they issued a fix to keep the peace. Unfortunately, it sounds like the fix is just to geofence the lot and inhibit honking there, which seems like just a band-aid to us.

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Quad-Motor Electric Kart Gets A Little Too Thrilling

May 21, 2024 by Donald Papp 38 Comments

[Peter Holderith] has been on a mission to unlock the full potential of a DIY quad-motor electric go-kart as a platform. This isn’t his first rodeo, either. His earlier vehicle designs were great educational fun, but were limited to about a kilowatt of power. His current platform is in theory capable of about twenty. The last big change he made was adding considerably more battery power, so that the under-used motors could stretch their legs a little, figuratively speaking.

How did that go? [Peter] puts it like this: “the result of [that] extra power, combined with other design flaws, is terror.” Don’t worry, no one’s been hurt or anything, but the kart did break in a few ways that highlighted some problems.

The keyed stainless steel bracket didn’t stay keyed for long.

One purpose of incremental prototyping is to bring problems to the surface, and it certainly did that. A number of design decisions that were fine on smaller karts showed themselves to be inadequate once the motors had more power.

For one thing, the increased torque meant the motors twisted themselves free from their mountings. The throttle revealed itself to be twitchy with a poor response, and steering didn’t feel very good. The steering got heavier as speed increased, but it also wanted to jerk all over the place. These are profoundly unwelcome feelings when driving a small and powerful vehicle that lurches into motion as soon as the accelerator is pressed.

Overall, one could say the experience populated the proverbial to-do list quite well. The earlier incarnation of [Peter]’s kart was a thrilling ride, but the challenge of maintaining adequate control over a moving platform serves as a reminder that design decisions that do the job under one circumstance might need revisiting in others.

Force Feedback Steering Wheel Made From Power Drill

August 3, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

When it comes to controllers for racing games, there is perhaps no better option than a force feedback steering wheel. With a built-in motor to push against the wheel at exactly the right times, they can realistically mimic the behavior of a steering wheel from a real car. The only major downside is cost, with controllers often reaching many hundreds of dollars. [Jason] thought it shouldn’t be that hard to build one from a few spare parts though and went about building this prototype force feedback steering wheel for himself.

Sourcing the motor for the steering wheel wasn’t as straightforward as he thought originally. The first place he looked was an old printer, but the DC motor he scavenged from it didn’t have enough torque to make the controller behave realistically, so he turned to a high-torque motor from a battery-powered impact driver. This also has the benefit of coming along with a planetary gearbox as well, keeping the size down, as well as including its own high-current circuitry. The printer turned out to not be a total loss either, as the encoder from the printer was used to send position data about the steering wheel back to the racing game. Controlling the device is an Arduino, which performs double duty sending controller information from the steering wheel as well as receiving force feedback instructions from the game to drive the motor in the steering wheel. Continue reading “Force Feedback Steering Wheel Made From Power Drill” →

Robot Races A Little Smarter To Go Faster

April 17, 2023 by Matthew Carlson 4 Comments

[Steven Gong] is attending the University of Waterloo and found himself with a 1/10th scale F1TENTH autonomous RC car. What better use of a fast RC car with some smarts than to race itself around your computer science building?

Onboard is an Nvidia Jetson NX (not the new Nvidia Jetson Orin), a lidar module, and a depth camera. The code runs on top of ROS2, and the results were impressive. [Steven] mapped out the fifth floor of his building at 6 am using SLAM and the onboard sensors. With a map, he created a rough track for his car to follow. First, the car needs to know when to brake and when to hit the gas. With the basics out of the way, [Steven] moved on to the fun part. He wrote code to generate a faster racing line. Every turn has an optimal speed and approach, but each turn affects the next turn, which turns it into a rather exciting optimization problem.

Along the way, [Steven] fixed the gearbox, tuned the PID steering loop, and removed the software speed limits. It’s impressive engineering, and we love seeing the car zoom around faster and faster. The car eventually hit 25km/h, which seems pretty fast for indoors. The code and more details are up on GitHub.

However, if you’re curious about playing around with self-driving, perhaps a much smaller scale Pi Zero-based racer might be more your speed. Video after the break.

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Riding Mower CVT Upgrade Really Gets Things Moving

April 23, 2022 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

As we’ve learned from past experience, videos from [HowToLou] tend to be a bit controversial. His unique style of expedient engineering isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, especially when it’s combined with a devil-may-care attitude towards safety. On the other hand, there’s no arguing that his methods get results. His video on converting an 18 HP riding mower into something akin to a go-kart is a perfect example.

The first phase of the project involves removing all the hardware related to mowing, as obviously you won’t be cutting any grass while pushing speeds of 48 kph (30 mph). This both saves weight, and removes a lot of mechanical complication that would be in the way of further modification. That said, it also leaves the mower immobile, as there’s no longer be any connection between the engine and transaxle.

The new drivetrain features some beefy bracing.

In its place, [HowToLou] installs an off-the-shelf torque converter kit that uses a continuously variable transmission (CVT) clutch. As he quickly demos, the CVT technology allows the gear ratio to automatically adapt to the engine RPM thanks to pulleys that change their size depending on how fast they’re spinning. It’s a big improvement over the system he originally yanked out, though as you might expect, fitting it into the mower required some custom work. The final step was to pull the old pulley off of the transaxle and replace it with one that’s less than half the original size.

Wearing his protective flip-flops, [HowToLou] hops on the souped-up mower and is nearly thrown off the back of it as soon as he steps on the gas. Clearly the modifications were a success, and the video ends with some open road testing — presumably he’s riding off to the store to go buy a helmet.

We actually missed this video when it first made the rounds, but it has since picked up steam and is pulling in some impressive numbers. [HowToLou] tells us he thinks it’s due to the fact that a lot of people are upgrading to more modern zero-turn mowers, meaning there’s a surplus of these second-hand mini tractors on the market. Whatever the reason, we’re happy to see this backyard engineer get some mainstream success; his methods might not always be by the book, but they’re always entertaining.

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Whipping Together A Little Ray Tracer Racer

December 27, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 11 Comments

When you hear raytracing, you might think of complex dark algorithms that to stare too long at their source code invites the beginning of madness. And you’re technically not far off from the truth, but [h3r2tic] put a small open-source ray tracing game demo up on GitHub. The actual rust code powering the game is relatively short (just four files), with the longest file being the physics file. But, of course, there is a small mountain of code under this sample in the form of libraries.

Kajiya, physx-rs, and dolly are the three libraries that make this little demo possible. Kajiya, in particular, is what makes raytracing possible as it uses the newer RTX features (so only more recent Nvidia and AMD cards are supported) and Vulkan bindings. But, of course, it isn’t wholly ray-traced as we are still several years out from proper real-time raytracing. Nevertheless, the blend between raytracing and traditional rasterization looks incredible. The most important thing about this simple tiny sample isn’t the game itself but what it stands for. It shows how easy it is to create a sample like this. Even just five years, creating a demo like this required massive effort and expertise.

Visually, it is stunning to look at. While the reflections are most apparent, the takeaway from this is the ease that real-time global illumination brings. A quick look through the code shows that there are very few lights in the scene, despite looking well lit with soft shadows. Traditional video games spend a significant amount of development time lighting a scene, placing additional lights, and tweaking them to make up for all the shortcuts that lighting has to take in a rasterized environment. As more and more games are built with raytracing in mind rather than tacked on at the end, we can ditch the small crumbling mountain of hacks that we are forced to use in games today and just rely on the rays to accurately light a scene.

If using a library for your raytracing seems too easy, perhaps you’d like to take on the challenge of raytracing in excel. Video after the break.

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