Toorbo

Date: Feb 2013
Category: Programming, Prototyping

During my studies at Politecnico di Milano, I attended a Physical Computing class; as the class’ final project, me and my team developed Toorbo, a real life racing videogame.
Adding a color sensor to an R/C car, we gave it the possibility to read some special colored icons placed on the track in order to allow some actions as it happens in videogames, for example with turbo boosts or oil stains.

We started by learning to use and calibrate the sensor and the R/C car controller board, connecting them to an Arduino chipset card.
Once we did it, we merged the two codes together and simplified the circuit using a breadboard, then we soldered the final circuit on an Arduino Proto Shield. With this the Arduino card was enabled to “read the road” thanks to the color sensor, changing the r/c car behavior when passing on some specific colors.

The final prototype was then able to read four colored icons:

• A green arrow to get a turbo boost, raising the speed from 80% to 100%.
• A red arrow to get a slow down, lowering the speed from 80% to 50%.
• A dark blue oil stain to get the car unable to steer.
• A yellow spiral to invert the controls (up is down, left is right and so on).