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Pokemon GO Hardware Project: Egg Hatching

spannerspencer

I know this is something of a daring leap onto an out of control bandwagon, but the fact is that there's something of a Pokemon GO epidemic going on at element14 Towers.

 

And we're a bit fascinated about how you guys might be able to help us to game the Pokemon Go game.

 

The facts are these.

 

Pokemon Eggsimage

In case you (somewhat understandably) haven't succumbed to the digital charms of Pokemon GO yet, here's how the egg feature works.

 

Dotted around the real world are locations called Pokestops. Among their various uses within the games, these are locations where players can collect Pokemon eggs. These eggs are also sometimes awarded as you achieve new levels within the game (much like our levels (presumably where Nintendo got the idea)).

 

Eggs are hatched by physically walking a predetermined distance. It could be two, five or ten kilometres, depending on the egg. The app is clever enough to figure out whether you're moving at walking speeds, or faster, so you can't dupe it by launching the game on your phone while driving to work, for instance.

 

Egg Hatching Machines

So What I'd like to challenge you guys with is coming up with a design for a machine, including the parts required, to artificially hatch a Pokemon GO egg. It'll need to keep your smartphone in motion at close to walking speeds, and move it enough far enough for the app to be able to monitor the distance via GPS; which could, location depending, be a bit of an inaccurate signal.

 

Only really looking for concepts here, but if anyone actually feels like building their machine, that'd be especially awesome!

 

While you're working on that, I'll look into what kind of swag I can get my hands on to reward the most inventive of our potential Pokemon project pirates!

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  • Hello Spanner ! Great idea. First of all.

     

    Then I have already though that the mechanism of the Pokemon POI were something like this. What I have not yet clear is if the POI are really fixed or generated by your moving, walking, driving etc. in few words if the app users find the Pokemons generated by the app itself depending on the mobile response or if there are really physical locations where these can be found. In this last case for example if I am in a certain place and you message me that you have found a Pokemon egg in another place nearby where I am and I came there I find the egg or not.

     

    Version with Raspberry PI + Android developer settings

     

    Depending on these two hypothesis there are two affordable solutions, bot valid that I try to resume in the next few points as a general methodological approach to the problem:

     

    1. setup the smartphone and keep it in your pocket, table, bag or somewhere else; disable any possible component of the Pokemon application running and obviously the app itself. Better if you don't install it at all.
    2. Start the Android 6 (should also work on 5.x but for a lot of reasons it is better on android 6) simulator. To do this you need a desktop, laptop, or - I should try - A raspberry PI3 running Ubuntu. The reason of Ubuntu is that I am sure that the AndroidStudio works on this platform.
    3. Launch the Android machine simulator, using the same platform characteristics of your smartphone (the one where the Pokemon app can run)
    4. Setup the simulator to accept a GPS dummy location, used by developers to test GPS based applications without the physical machine
    5. At this point configure the virtual Android device with the same account of your physical machine and install the Pokemon application. It should run without problems. And GPS is already hacked.

     

    At this point - to make the things a real machine - with few programming make a local php server (you need Apache + Php + (hopefully) PhpMyAdmin) and create a path generator based on the Google APIs. The collected data will feed the GPS data table (locations) on the Android simulator.

     

    At this point, just sitting at your preferred bar drinking and enjoying the lazy-side of the life you can go everywhere you want and discover any possible Pokemont egg all around the world.

     

    To make a complete real hacking machine, don't forget to setup a simple twitter easy application to tweet every egg you are pirating.

  • Tip of the day: don't use a microwave oven ...


      imageimage

  • Well I guess I would just attach it to a Roomba and let it run, or maybe even tape my phone to the back of an RC car and have some fun while the eggs hatch.