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Welcome to Waterloo Labs!
Today we're here at Austin's Park to play some Real Life Mario Kart.
Hi I'm Hunter, and I'm Ben
and welcome to Waterloo Labs
Now, I like Mario Kart, and I like real go karts, so we though why not add the two together?
now, in order to play Real Life Mario Kart we need to be able to control three things,
First, to be able to control the kart automatically with the gas, break and steering.
Secondly we need to be able to launch things like turtle shells at people.
Finally we need an item system so that we can recognize when the kart runs over a banana peel let's say.
We have two different types of systems that control our kart.
The first are servo motors.
They're like regular electric motors with potentiometers built in.
which allows them to accurately control how far they rotate,
and then, we can accurately control how much throttle to give.
We also have a low pressure system
It starts with a high pressure paintball tank,
and a low pressure regulator
which feeds into electronic valves and pneumatic pistons.
These pneumatic pistons can wobble the steering column
which then lets us turn the kart,
or pull on the brake, stopping the kart.
All the electronic valves and the servos as well, are controlled by a compactRIO.
It's a Real Time, ruggedized
microprocessor, that can do lots of computations really fast
and can also communicate with the other karts, which gives us one large system
and a base that we can control everything from.
A twelve volt battery connects to an electric air compressor
which pressurizes this tube here up to 120 psi.
When I throw this valve, you do not want to be in front of me.
The most recognizable aspect of Mario Kart, is the item system.
So, how to we implement this with our go karts?
by using the RFID technology from Wavetrend.
RFID stands for Radio Frequency IDentification.
What it allows us to do, is send information through the air, with radio waves.
The RFID system consists of a tag and a reader.
We take that tag and put it inside an item,
and the reader stays on the kart.
So, when the kart is hit by an item, the reader can detect the information coming off of the tag
This information is then sent to the cRIO, which figures out which item was detected, and what should be done to the kart.
yahoo!
mamamia!
yahoo!
Bark! Bark!