Well the water gun idea worked great for the most part, but now them rabbits are coming down the other side of the house and by passing the gun.  So I had a thought; what about going mobile.  But for this idea we were going to need a great deal more thought.  Well the idea got started and like most ideas it morphed into something that sounded like way to much fun not to build.  So I made the car, and mounted a water gun on it, and even shot water out of it, but in the end it never made it to the battle field.  Instead it was turned into WiFi Warthogs,  a Laser Tag game.  It can be played by a minimum of 2 players (one for each car), but can go to any number of players real quick, it all depends on the number of cars you wish to use.  Here is a video of it in play.

In this video you see two cars and there were only two players.  The players are using XBox 360 controllers to control the cars.  A player can be either the driver or the gunner if there is only one player per car.  If there are two players per car then one is the driver one is the gunner.  When you see the cars stopped, it is because the driver has switched to gunner mode and is in the process of shooting.  Yes if your car gets hit you will get feedback in the form of the controller shaking and lights on the gun.

The cars will be out at the PDC this year if you are going, stop by and try them out…  I will be breaking them down on exactly how I built them on the Coding4Fun site, the site can be found here.   It should appear there some time in December 09. 

To give you some ideas of what will be covered, first think about the big picture.  These are PowerWheels Barbie Jeeps that for the most part are still in their original format.  The steering and transmission robotics were controlled by Phidget’s devices.  I used Windows 7 on an Eee Pc to control everything and of course for the LaserTag game itself I used a standard LaserTag set of guns.  

In the article that will soon appear on Coding4Fun, I will break down the mechanical make up in detail as well as how the different software engines were created.  In addition I will leave you with some food for thought on how you can expand or make some of you own changes.

On this site I will go into some detail on some of the prototyping that was used prior to the finish product, as it has a great deal of merit and would have been used had we not found some some easier ways to do parts.  And of course I will go into the way to make the water gun work…

So stay tuned there will be more to come.

After fighting the rabbits all summer we needed to up the stakes.  The first version brought out many flaws.  First we could not turn the water pressure up all the way as it stretched some of the water lines and slowed and limited the range of the water gun.  Also it only went back and forth, and at night the IR was not very strong.  Sooooo…

This year we also switched out a great deal of the electronics and software.  Last year a Phidgets single servo controller was used, this year I switch to a Polou 8 servo serial controller.  I also added a pan and tilt setup so that the gun could go up and down besides going from left to right.  The copper tubing was switched with a plastic ice maker hose,  and just to add to the fun two in ground pop up sprinklers were added.

The pan and tilt setup came from ServoCity in fact the servos and any parts for the servos came from here.

Again this year I used Andrew’s AForge libraries for the motion detection, he has moved to a new site it can be found here.   I was able to modify his code and add in different functionality that I wanted. It also has some great examples and the forums are great for answers.

One piece of code that made life very easy was written by Colin Karpfinger, his examples made the jump to the Polou servo controller a nice easy one.  He can be found here.

For most of the parts(servo controller, wire, etc) I got them from Trossen Robotics they can be found here.  Not only can you get the parts here, but you can get some great help from the community in their forums.

How did it all fair? That will be in the next post.  There were some success and some failures.  At that time I will go more in the the code and some of the videos of it in action…