Apart from orienteering (at Shining Cliff for Richard), cycling (35 miles for me) and walking around a wood in preparation for organising an orienteering event, we’ve been playing with our new toy!
I don’t need to say anymore… watch the video!
Apart from orienteering (at Shining Cliff for Richard), cycling (35 miles for me) and walking around a wood in preparation for organising an orienteering event, we’ve been playing with our new toy!
I don’t need to say anymore… watch the video!
OMG – it’s even complete with steam-train sound effects!
Which I guess won’t “work” without the hard smooth flooring. 😐
So next you need a full size version that can drive you where you want to go (home?) while you catch some sleep after, say, a mountain marathon…
They aren’t sound effects – the noise is the friction in the car. The cars only go at one speed and so to control the car sufficiently to do a figure of 8, we had to program it to power forwards in pulses, rather than continuously. It works pretty well on carpet too, but each time you change the surface you have to re-program the number of right and left turns because the traction is quite different…..plus the cars are a bit rubbish and don’t turn left and right by the same amount!
Yeah, I’d realised the noise was the “programming” but had thought it was wheel-spin on the hard floor.
Anyhow, you get what you pay for – perhaps more than £5 cars might provide more consistent performance?
Oh, why? Is this just for fun, or is there an application in the pipeline?
I must admit my first though was “Why? Why?!” and my second was “How soon will the novelty wear off?”. But I wait future developments with interest…. 🙂
Partly for fun, partly because I ought to be a bit better with hardware than I am, and partly there’s a longer-term application in the pipeline.
As for the steam train sound effects, the stick-slip characteristics of the wheels are such that constant power tends to lead to doughnuts (even with the wheels straight), whereas pulsed power leads to reasonably controllable behaviour. Unfortunately, there is a minimum pulse size the remote control will reliably transmit.
It’s official. You are an Ardweeb. Keep going and you can move on to being an Ardweenie.