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How should my runners run??

lorrainbow

My next element14 presents video uses an arduino to move runners along a track, according to their strava data. The first runner to reach 100km wins!

There's a short video on my twitter: 

The questions I have for my lovely element14 community is how should I move the runners?

At the moment they're running all of their kilometres at once, one at a time. e.g. runner1 runs their total 50km, runner2 runs their total 75km, etc.

We could make them all run at once. 

We could make them run each run at a time, e.g. runner1 runs their first run 5km, runner2 runs their first run 10km and so on and then loop back to runner1 and their 2nd run. OR finally all runners run run1, then all runners run run2, etc. 

EDIT: To clarify, it's not a live track. There's a button and when it's pressed all the runners reverse to the start line then start running. Otherwise I'd miss my runner moving!

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  • in reply to Mikeatencio

    That would likely depend upon which version of the game you are referring to, which of the original features you want to retain and how it is to be presented.

    At a basic level, in order to get an eight horse game, you would just need to double up the number of running tracks to eight, replace the runners with horses and then replace the Strava API based code with new code for the chosen user interface and game logic.

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    I'm printing the 3D parts right now. I'm not sure what to keep and what to delete in the code. I'm not much of a coder, and deleting the wrong things is a little intimidating. I wish they would have commented on what parts of the code go to what. That would have made it easier to figure out.

    For simple operation, I'd be happy to hit a button to cue up the horses, touch it again, and it randomly makes each horse move at its own speed. No one knows which one will win. Hit the button again, and the horses return to the start.

    That being said, would I need two 4-motor driver shields or just one? How many horses can run on that motorboard at a time? And is it expandable if I want more? I would like to think it can run up to 12 horses at a time for reunions.   These are the questions I have. Thanks for the reply. I didn't think anyone would answer.

  • in reply to Mikeatencio

    That motor board supports up to four motors at one time.

    You could add another board to get eight motors but you will need enough GPIO for this. Note that the speed control requires a GPIO pin that can provide PWM and you may not have enough on some microcontrollers.

    If you are planning on scaling up, then you might find that the Mega is a more suitable board as it has more PWM pins.
       https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/language/functions/analog-io/analogwrite/

    If you don't need to drive all eight motors at the same time, then you could also look at switching the output of the motor board to drive different groups of four motors.

    If you look at the Wiki page here:
       https://wiki.dfrobot.com/Quad_Motor_Driver_Shield_for_Arduino_SKU_DRI0039
    you will find some example code to do the basic motor control with that board.

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    I agree, the bigger board might be the way to go. Arduino Mega 2560 is the one I'm considering for future upgrading.

    image versus  image

    The motors have the drive transmission on them and they have a cable input as well. Can I use the standard motor and transmission without the cable inputs? The suggested motors aren't in stock. I have motors with the trans here for a different project I built without the cable inputs. Can I use those instead?

  • in reply to Mikeatencio

    The DFRobot motors used in the project have an encoder built into them so as you can count the number of rotations as the motor runs.

    The motor/gearbox you have shown doesn't appear to have this feature.

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    That's what I guessed. Thanks for confirming it. Thank you @beacon_dave