
Classic Sega Rally Arcade machine meets RC cars using Arduinos - andr3
http://www.artica.cc/blog/2012/11/21/segarallychampionship/
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doublerebel
Amazing. Anybody want to get together and build a full-on robot arcade? I can
see this being the future of 'virtual reality' gaming -- reality from a non-
human perspective.

Battling drone fleets, tiny warhammer-style robots causing real destruction on
a miniature scale, high-speed chases through scale sized representations of
real-life courses...

Alas like so many good ideas, perhaps this is already happening somewhere...

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andr3
Hey! And you'll always get the physics engine built-in for free! :-P

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brc
I used to love Sega Rally. The amount of cash I dropped down those machines
while racing friends. I think my ultimate games room would have a Sega Rally
machine in the corner.

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antihero
Weirdly, I did a project like this at uni, except we used an Xbox 360
controller to control the car, and I think more interestingly, we used MiWi
(PIC chip wireless subset) to communicate with the car.

Whereas other teams sent a packet every time they did an "update" (they were
using keyboard not 360 controllers), this meant there was a lot of lag as the
link was limited to 500 bytes/sec, and sending a package irregularly meant
lots of overhead.

What I did instead was I engineered it so we constantly sent (and received) a
packet 40x a second, and this meant our updates were far less laggy and much
more consistent. We just had a couple of bytes for the steering, a couple of
bytes for the acceleration, and some other "flag" bits to determine what data
should be sent back (reading off all the sensors at once leads to blocking).

We also had an accelerometer in the RC car, which I mapped (roughly) onto the
360 pad's force feedback, so you could "feel" what the RC was feeling.

The fact that we used miwi meant that we could control the thing over IP which
was cool.

Great fun, we won too! I'm just sad that because our code was in a Dropbox
shared folder, some idiot has deleted it.

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stephengillie
That's very cool, and I'm surprised RC cars aren't being used in more Arduino
projects. I wish it actually was a detailed post, because I'd love to learn
more about the Arduino setup in there -- if he's using the Motor shield, how
the batteries are hooked up, etc. And how much did the materials cost -- xbee
radios are around $100 each I believe...

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cnlwsu
xbee radios are ~20$ although there are some more expensive ones if you need
40 mile range.

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stephengillie
The only ones I've been able to find are around $100~$300.

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mmetzger
Some kits may be over the $100 mark, but individual radios are usually in the
$20-$30 mark.

[https://www.sparkfun.com/search/results?term=xbee&what=p...](https://www.sparkfun.com/search/results?term=xbee&what=products)

[https://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=adasearch&q...](https://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=adasearch&q=xbee)

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techtalsky
It's really wonderful to start to see this wave of Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and
other super inexpensive but plenty powerful enough for a range of applications
type devices.

More and more are popping up on Reddit and HN every day and it looks to be
ushering a little hobbyist "golden age". I can't wait to see where it takes
us.

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makomk
It's not that wonderful; because the Arduino and Raspberry Pi are so popular
they keep getting used for projects which they're really not the best choice
for like this one. Pretty much any old PC would've been able to drive the
original arcade monitors, but because the Pi can't they wound up having to rip
them out and replace them with TVs that are probably of worse quality, losing
some of the original feel of the machine in the process. (Even if the Pi had a
VGA out it still wouldn't work because the Pi has a closed source graphics
driver that doesn't allow you to set non-standard modes.)

Sadly driving stuff off old PCs isn't nearly as fashionable as the Raspberry
Pi.

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CrLf
An old PC consumes about 90W of power, a Raspberry Pi consumes 2.5W. That's a
_36x_ difference. And you would still need something to interface the PC with
the rest of the electronics, just as you need something to interface the
Raspberry Pi's video output with these "non-standard" CRTs.

As for the quality of TVs... these were showing video from the cars
transmitted over RF, hardly high-quality. And you overestimate the quality of
CRTs in arcade machines... Most of the arcades on display had not-so-good CRTs
(either by design or because of years of burn-in).

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rheide
Very impressive! There does seem to be quite a bit of lag between the steering
movements and the rc car response.

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alcidesfonseca
I tested the machine at Codebits and I had that same first impression. But
after a while I got it: it was the pedal tuning and not some communication
delay.

