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racer
While most people spent their holiday playing with toys, Irish maker Conor O'Neill was busy daisy-chaining a Raspberry Pi, MaKey MaKey invention kit, and slices of cheese — yes, cheese — to create a uniquely controlled RC car.
The project began with O'Neill, an engineer by training, looking for a Christmas gift for his children, ages six and seven. It had to be interesting enough that it wouldn't be tossed aside before the new year and cheap enough to stay off his credit card balance in 2013. He came across the "i-Racer" a £19.99 (about $32.50) RC car with a Bluetooth radio, rack-and-pinion steering and a rechargeable battery. The car is supposed to be controlled with an Android phone, but O'Neill figured that with a little MaKey MaKey hacking it could be steered with something more unique.
The MaKey MaKey breakout board allows everything from bananas to pails of water to become inputs for a computing device. Paired with a $2 Bluetooth dongle and Raspberry Pi board, the toy race car could potentially be controlled with anything in a pantry. O'Neill took on the grating task of connecting and debugging the various components, sharing his recipe in a very detailed blog post.
"Whilst these steps are quite short and the code is very simple, it took a week of evenings cursing, hacking and googling to get everything working right," he writes.
In the end, the car worked like butter, shredded on the hardwood floor and looked sharp at the same time.
After trying cheese, grapes and a Barbie doll as control mechanisms, the O'Neills are now looking to hack the Nintendo WiiMote to control their car. "We have tons of them in the house and they are all big Wii fans," says O'Neill. But he also adds that their food adventures aren't over. "On the MaKey MaKey front we want to try more foods. The original plan was to use Christmas mince pies, but their big brother ate them all."
While this project might seem like a cross between a Rube Goldberg contraption and a Wallace and Gromit invention, the project incorporates professional-grade applications. "The whole idea of 'tinkering' is incredibly important," says O'Neill. "The code I posted last night for controlling the i-racer is multi-threaded. That's the first time I have ever done multi-threaded code in Python. Last year I learned the basics of Node.js whilst scratching a similar itch on a Twitter project. Whilst I'm not a full-time programmer (I used to be), I manage programmers and make all the major technical decisions in our company. These little side projects can be a fun and effective way for me to check out interesting technologies for potential use in the company. One of our internal tools is now built in Node for that very reason."
Photo: Conor O'Neill
