Destruction Derby at Maker Faire Rome 2015.

If you attended Maker Faire Rome 2015, you may have noticed some toy cars powered by Arduino* 101 racing around within a wooden arena in the Intel* booth. What you witnessed was our “Destruction Derby” game which grabbed the attention of hundreds of kids … and big kids, i.e. their parents! We created this game to demonstrate one of the many applications that can be made possible by Arduino 101.

Each toy car was mounted with an Arduino 101 which was wired to the car’s internal drive and steering motors. The movement of each car was remotely controlled using a smart phone or tablet running a custom app which communicated to a car’s Arduino 101 via Bluetooth 4.0 (BLE).

The purpose of the game was for each player’s car to achieve the highest amount of collisions with other cars within a fixed amount of time. Collisions were detected using accelerometer technology. The arena was designed and laser cut into shape by our innovative friends in FabLab Limerick.

Arduino 101 is the first widely available development board based on the tiny, low-power Intel® Curie™ module. Easy to use and affordable, the Arduino 101 is ideal for education environments, makers and embedded developers.

For more details on how we implemented Destruction Derby please contact our maker team.

Note: Arduino* 101 is known as Genuino* 101 outside the USA. *Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.