See into S60

April 29, 2008 More about that RC truck Posted by Oren at 04:47 PM | Categories: S60 Events

I promised Saara that I would write more about our RC truck demo. As she wrote earlier, we used a Nokia N95 to drive a radio-controlled truck around the expo floor at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. This was a great way to attract visitors to our booth, and also an excellent demonstration of the sort of creative things that are possible with S60, when you combine software development tools like Python for S60 with smart programmers.

In this case, the smart programmers are a team from the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria, who developed the software and Bluetooth hardware that made this truck go. After we saw the video of their ShakerRacer demo (and showed it in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress), we got in touch with Andreas Jakl and Stephan Selinger from Hagenberg to see if they could help us build some vehicles of our own. They were willing to help, and worked with Juha Komulainen and others in our Nokia Demolab team to modify a truck in time for the Web 2.0 event. We built the truck, and they provided the Bluetooth control module and mobile Python program that turned the N95 into an RC controller.

We're now planning to build at least two more trucks for use in future events, including the upcoming S60 Summit in May. In the meantime, we shipped the truck from last week's demo to our office in Boston, so we can show it off the Nokians here (and play a bit more on our own).

if you're inspired by this to work on your own remote control projects, you can find the ShakerRacer source code (open source) and hardware instructions online for your experimentation and enjoyment. if you build something cool, please let us know!

--Oren

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Comments

Oren,

I think we're all wondering the same thing - how many N95's can that thing jump......

Hi,

did that already some years ago for a university project using native C++ S60 application with Atmega processor and bluetooth chip:

http://www.lfbs.rwth-aachen.de/users/global/SA_DA/Studienarbeit_bluebot.pdf
(if you can read German ;-))

Max

Oren: thanks, we were glad to help! Great that the truck was received so well and that you're going to demo it at future events too.

Max: that's a very nice project as well, thanks for the link!

Controlling hardware devices per Bluetooth from the mobile phone is indeed nothing new - the unique thing about ShakerRacer is that a toy car can be controlled by movements of a mobile phone, which makes driving a lot of fun and a new experience.

Another aspect why I think that ShakerRacer turned out to be very interesting for visitors is that it only slightly modifies hardware that is well known and can be understood by everyone - in this case an RC car. It makes you wonder what's happening here and why you can control a toy car with a phone.

Another, more hardware-oriented department at our university built a robot spider that can be (among other things) controlled via the RC controller of a toy car. It's a great project as well and was a lot more difficult to do (like the prototype with the c't bot that you built) than ShakerRacer.

However, for demos the instant recognition of a toy car with a twist seems to be very important. At least this was my impression at some events where both of those projects were demoed side-by-side. If there's a custom hardware driving/moving around, you somehow expect that it can be controlled by some PC or mobile device. But you don't expect it for a standard toy car...

To sum it up - ShakerRacer started as a small fun-project. But I think it was just lucky enough to combine the right ingredients and that it appeared at the right moment.

Best regards,
Andreas

Something every marketeer aspires to: Getting something unique for the conference floor booth. Congrats Oren -- You managed to do just that. Easily the best demo at Web 2.0...in my (unbiased of course) opinion....

I recently got RC truck from Hobbytron for my kids!!

S60 Open to new features

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