2024 Tiny Games Contest: Realistic Steering Wheel Joystick In Miniature

August 30, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

For racing games, flight simulators, and a few other simulation-style games, a simple controller just won’t do. You want something that looks and feels closer to the real thing. The major downsides to these more elaborate input methods is that they take up a large amount of space, requiring extra time for setup, and can be quite expensive as well. To solve both of these problems [Rahel zahir Ali] created a miniature steering wheel controller for some of his favorite games.

While there are some commercial offerings of small steering wheels integrated into an otherwise standard video game controller and a few 3D printed homebrew options, nothing really felt like a true substitute. The main design goal with this controller was to maintain the 900-degree rotation of a standard car steering wheel in a smaller size. It uses a 600P/R rotary encoder attached to a knob inside of a printed case, with two spring-loaded levers to act as a throttle and brake, as well as a standard joystick to adjust camera angle and four additional buttons. Everything is wired together with an Arduino Leonardo that sends the inputs along to the computer.

Now he’s ready to play some of his favorite games and includes some gameplay footage using this controller in the video linked below. If you’re racing vehicles other than cars and trucks, though, you might want a different type of controller for your games instead.

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Hackaday Links: August 18, 2024

August 18, 2024 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

They’re back! The San Francisco autonomous vehicle hijinks, that is, as Waymo’s fleet of driverless cars recently took up the fun new hobby of honking their horns in the wee hours of the morning. Meat-based neighbors of a Waymo parking lot in the South Market neighborhood took offense at the fleet of autonomous vehicles sounding off at 4:00 AM as they shuffled themselves around in the parking lot in a slow-motion ballet of undetermined purpose. The horn-honking is apparently by design, as the cars are programmed to tootle their horn trumpets melodiously if they detect another vehicle backing up into them. That’s understandable; we’ve tootled ourselves under these conditions, with vigor, even. But when the parking lot is full of cars that (presumably) can’t hear the honking and (also presumably) know where the other driverless vehicles are as well as their intent, what’s the point? Luckily, Waymo is on the case, as they issued a fix to keep the peace. Unfortunately, it sounds like the fix is just to geofence the lot and inhibit honking there, which seems like just a band-aid to us.

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Quad-Motor Electric Kart Gets A Little Too Thrilling

May 21, 2024 by Donald Papp 39 Comments

[Peter Holderith] has been on a mission to unlock the full potential of a DIY quad-motor electric go-kart as a platform. This isn’t his first rodeo, either. His earlier vehicle designs were great educational fun, but were limited to about a kilowatt of power. His current platform is in theory capable of about twenty. The last big change he made was adding considerably more battery power, so that the under-used motors could stretch their legs a little, figuratively speaking.

How did that go? [Peter] puts it like this: “the result of [that] extra power, combined with other design flaws, is terror.” Don’t worry, no one’s been hurt or anything, but the kart did break in a few ways that highlighted some problems.