Development progressing along

Neil and I have made some decent progress on a few different fronts.

Let's break all of it down.

On the hardware side, a vehicle prototype was modeled in Autodesk Inventor and subsequently 3D printed.  The design allows for both servo motors (the motors that drive the left and right wheels) to be mounted securely below the 3D printed body.  A free-spinning caster at the front of the body is used to complete the three-wheel design.

First prototype of vehicle body

Electronics, including the battery, microcontroller, LED, and IR receiver, will be mounted on the top of the 3D printed body.  Initially, there were concerns over the largeness of the vehicle in relation to the overall field size.  We want the user to be able to drive around the field without to having to abruptly change directions because they've reached one end or side of the field.  It was decided that we can make the body of the vehicle a bit larger to better accommodate the hardware, especially the battery, while still having room on the field to roam.

There was also success with communications between two Arduinos, with one sending out messages via a blinking IR LED, and the other receiving the message with an IR receiver.  This will be the basis for communication between the computer and each vehicle, so this progress was crucial to the completion of the project.

On the software side, improvements and adjustments have been made with regards to the physics interactions of the virtual models of cars and the objects they collide with.  This is a result of switching from a 2D environment to 3D, which allows for more realistic behaviors of objects being collided with and other features, such as the appearance of a 3D rendered ball rolling around.

There is a potential new avenue for functional mobile controllers through the use of a tool called HappyFunTimes.  It seems to provide the features that we need (mobile browser support for both iOS and Android, compatibility with Unity game engine), for the low, low price of free.  It will require a few considerable adjustments to operate exactly as we would like it to, but the gist is that it is an almost ready-to-go solution for controlling a Unity game over Wi-Fi with mobile phones without the need to install any app (aka exactly what we are trying to do).

There are still a few problems that don't have perfect solutions.  I'm still testing out different webcams to be used for the project.  This is the camera that will track the LEDs on all of the moving vehicles.  The few that have been tested either have too much latency or have issues resolving the LED markers in the final image.

We are also trying to decide on a power solution for each vehicle.  The current line of thinking involves purchasing relatively small (2000 mAh) USB power banks to power the microcontroller and the motors.  Preliminary testing has shown that there can be issues with the power bank providing power if the current draw isn't enough.  There are known solutions to that problem, though.

The alternative to USB power banks would be to purchase rechargeable batteries that would normally be found on RC hobbyist vehicles.  The downside to those is that it would require a specialized charging device, which, if we would like to charge multiple at once, could be costly to purchase.  Whereas with a USB power bank, we would simply have to plug each bank into a USB port to charge which can be facilitated through the use of a USB hub.

Overall, solid progress for the past week or so.  Stay tuned for future updates.