Construct your personal human horse race arcade recreation utilizing Arduino and Strava

Each arcade appears to have one explicit recreation that appeals to the gamblers amongst us: the horse race recreation. That recreation has a number of mannequin horses and other people can gamble on the result of their race. The outcomes are both random or managed by the gamers by some form of enter mechanism. In a brand new video, element14’s Lorraine Underwood explains recreate that recreation with an Arduino — however powered by folks.

The sport idea is much like the horse race arcade recreation, besides gamers run to affect the success of their respective racers. These racers are little 2D folks figures as a substitute of horses. Everybody can run on their very own schedule. Then, as soon as everybody completes their run, the sport exhibits the outcomes by transferring the figures throughout the observe. This hyperlinks to Strava, which is an app for monitoring runs utilizing fashionable gadgets like smartphones and smartwatches. Every participant simply has to finish a run as a part of the group that Underwood arrange for this goal.

As a result of the sport wants to drag run info from Strava’s API over the web, Underwood selected to make use of an Arduino UNO WiFi Rev2 board. It controls the motion of every determine utilizing a micro DC gearmotor with a belt. These motors got here from DFRobot and embrace encoders, that are useful for making certain the motion is actual. The sport helps 4 gamers, so Underwood added a DFRobot quad DC motor defend to the Arduino to drive the motors.

The Arduino sketch connects to the native WiFi, then pulls the gap lined by every runner from the Strava API. It then scales that all the way down to the gap of the sport observe and spins the motors till every determine reaches the corresponding distance.