Where did we go??

It's been a while since we last updated the blog. Both of us were busy working on other stuff such as the Invisible Handle in the Israeli GeekCon camp. Rest assured, that we did not abandon the Real Virtual Car project.

We decided that the car was too big and took too much space in our small garage and decided to cut it. The front seats will still remain (and be further enhanced) simulator, and the rear seats will be used for other purposes (more details soon). Cutting a car without having all the tools was not an easy task but we managed to do it in a few hours.

We started with the roof. Drew a line a started cutting it with a jigsaw:

Cut Here!

We then moved to the floor, which was more difficult...












and yes it does BURN when it hits your HEAD...


After three hours we had the car split into two...

IMAGE_00041

Original guages are back in place

Today I went with Gil, a friend of mine, to install the original guages back in the car. It took us a while to put everything back together, having the lights work and the microcontroller moving the needles. It turns out that most of the light bulbs got burned while we played with them. Also, it took us a while to figure out that our power adaptor did not have enough juice, so we hooked up a computer power supply and used the 12V to get more amperage.



We then put it back in the car...



Gil admiring his work at 2am..



(Sorry about the low quality of the pictures today, but I did not have my digital camera and had to settle for my cellphone)

-Yuval

Getting the original guages to work

After we managed to make the gauges work by "implanting" servo's in them, we decided that it's not good enough, since we would like the original car to remain unmodified as much as possible.

The guages needles move according to the frequency that they receive. Since it is impossible to generate those frequencies from Windows (or any other non real-time OS), we needed to move into hardware (yeah!).

We decided to go with Atmel AVR microcontroller chips (mainly because that's what we could easily find in Israel). We got a sample of an ATMEGA16 and wrote some C code to generate the frequencies (WinAVR and AVRlib). Since this is the first time we used this platform it took us a few hours to get it working.

Generating the frequencies is not enough -- you need the PC to ask the microcontroller to generate the right frequency according to the speed/rpm in the game. Unfortunatelly, the AVR cannot speak directly with an RS-232 interface, so we had to connect a MAX232 chip in order to get it working.

The sequence is as following: there is a process on the PC which collects the games telemtry with Nascar 2003 APIs. It then translate the speed/rpm to commands which are written to the microcontroller via a COM port. The microcontroller parses the requests and set the frequencies to the gauges accordingly.

Nice :-)

Videos available via eMule

As you've noticed many people have accessed this blog, which exceeded the limit to the server on which I publish the videos. Many people have asked to share the videos with eMule/Bittorrent. For now I've published them with eMule and will later on make them available with Bittorrent.

The ED2K link is here - feel free to share.

If you can,post these Videos where you can and write here a comment with a link to the files.

Enjoy,

-Yuval

It's Alive Videos !!!

This is the first time we actually tried to get it working



We decided to have some fun with it



We stubled into a bug in Nascar which froze the whole system for a few seconds. Funny enough it was exactly when a Viagra car passed us :-)



This is how looks inside and outside

RPM gauge is working with Nascar Racer 2003 Season

Today I wrote a small program that capture telemetry information from Papyrus Nascar Racer 2003 Season and move the servo engine in the RPM gauge accordingly. Click on the picture to download a clip to show it in action.

We got a car!

Finally, after searching several junk yards, we were able to find a decent car that meets our requirements: full dashboard with all the plastics in place, a wheel, gear stick, handbrake and chair. No engine. No wheels. The car is a Renault Megane I probably 1997 or so.



The car that we got was invovled in an accedient so it has the airbags open.



The guy that brought us the car, just left it at the entrance to the driveway and we had to get it closer to the workshop entrance. Luckly, we had a forklift...



The hard part was getting into the workshop through the narrow entrance.



Finally, it was inside.



Next, we have to take apart the semi broken front window and clean the car.

RPM gauge is working with Racer

Finally, after getting information about the hidden features of Racer, we were finally able to write a simple program in Java and receive the RPM information in real time. Whoo hooo!

You can click here to see a short clip..

Getting started

Zvika Netter and I met in Kinnernet 2005: Zvika has built the beautify MotoTank and I built a retro acrade system. At a 3am session we tried to think about ideas for new projects and decided to go with a car simulator that will be built inside a real car.