3D Printed Turtle Shell Racers Bring Mario Kart To Life

August 8, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

skimbals_3d_printed_turtle_shell_racers

Every once in awhile a project comes along that makes us say, “this is why we want a 3D printer!”

[Skimbal] is pretty well known in 3D printing circles for the incredibly detailed designs he has put out in the past. This time around, his focus is on motoring, Mario Kart style.

His Turtle Shell Racers are ripped right out of the Mario Kart series of games, and are built in the form of the multi-colored turtle shells with which most of us have a love/hate relationship. Constructed atop cheap RC trucks, the Shell Racers require 20-some odd printed parts apiece, but looking at the final results we think the time and money spent would be well worth it.

After watching the videos below, we think you’ll agree that these things look like a blast to play with. The Shell Racers were actually so impressive that they managed to land [Skimbal] a permanent gig with MakerBot Industries.

If you want to try making a set of your own, there are extensively detailed build instructions and all the STL files you can shake a stick at over at Thingiverse.

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An Autonomous Car Using A “Webcam”

June 13, 2011 by Jeremy Cook 8 Comments

This autonomous remote control-style car from Cornell students was designed for a senior level engineering course there. It’s main “sensor” is a low-res webcam style camera. As shown in the video after the break, this car does quite well staying within two black lines on a white surface using it’s vision processing. It also has an IR sensor to detect objects in front of the car and stop without crashing.

All “vision” computations are handled by an Atmel Mega644 MCU, an 8-bit processor. Because of the processing limits of this chip, much work had to be done to make this process computationally efficient. These students go through an incredibly detailed account of their project, focusing on the code and electrical design. Check out the video of their car in action after the break. Continue reading “An Autonomous Car Using A “Webcam”” →

Don’t Hit That Switch!

May 10, 2011 by Mike Nathan 44 Comments

switch_box

Hackaday reader [Danukeru] sent us a video featuring a box-based robot with an interesting personality. The box is fairly simple and from the outside seems to consist only of a switch and an LED. When the switch is flipped however, the box comes to life.

When the box is activated, the lid opens, and a small arm reaches out to turn the switch off. We’ve seen that plenty of times, but this one turns out to be a little different. In the video, this process seems to repeat a couple dozen times before the robot gets angry and flips out. At first we thought that the end portion of the video was done with a bit of digital trickery, but after reviewing the creator’s blog, it looks like it could be legit. It is very hard to see the box’s innards in the video, but it does house a remote control car chassis that allows it to move around and spin out, as seen below.

It’s a pretty neat project, and if you can handle reading the creator’s site via Google translate, there is plenty of picture documentation of the build process for your perusal.

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R/C Car Controlled By An IPad Or Kinect

March 31, 2011 by Mike Nathan 2 Comments

ipad_kinect_rc_control

R/C cars can be tons of fun, but sometimes the fun runs out after awhile. [Gaurav] got bored of steering around his R/C car with its remote, so he built an interface that lets him control the car using two different motion-detecting devices.

He built an HTML5 application for his iPad, which allows him to steer the car around. As you can see in the video below, the application utilizes the iPad’s tilt sensor to activate the car’s motors and steering depending on where on the screen he has moved the guide marker.

The second steering method he devised uses his Kinect sensor to track his movements. His hand gestures are mapped to a set of virtual spaces similar to those which the iPad uses. By moving his hands through these areas, the Arduino triggers the car’s remote just as it does with the iPad.

The actual remote control interface is achieved by wiring the car’s remote to an Arduino via a handful of opto-isolators. The Arduino is also connected to his computer via the serial port, where it waits for commands to be sent. In the case of the iPad, a Python server waits for commands to be issued from the HTML5 application. The Kinect’s interface is slightly different, with a C# application monitoring his movements and sending the commands directly to the serial port.

Check out the video below to see the car in action, and swing by his site if you are interested in grabbing some source code and giving it a try yourself.

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