Volkswagen Scirocco 2009 as a game controller
by eimink on Apr.23, 2010, under Hacks
Ok, I know it’s been quiet around here for a while, but there’s a good reason for that. We’ve been quite busy at work this spring but now I’m allowed to release some inside info about one of our projects here at Kajaani University of Applied Sciences.
Last year, we got a standard VW Scirocco to our CarLab learning environment and in the beginning of this year, one of our trainees began his quest in figuring out the on-board diagnostics bus on that thing. Now we have a nice batch of information about the inner workings of OBD-II diagnostic bus on this car and we can read most of the ECUs on that car. One of our project engineers took our data acquisition software for trucks and modified it to work with the ‘rocco and yesterday I wrote some code to translate the car’s data to virtual joystick port. Today, we did a quick test with Rally Trophy. There’s a short video I took during the test after the break!
The car isn’t modified in any way, if you don’t count the addition of better sound system, there’s just a PC communicating with the car’s CANbus using OBD-II connector. The software translates incoming data from the car to virtual joystick port so it is possible to use any driving game that the PC is capable of running.
With the basic system working, we noticed that there’s some lag in the system – the steering wasn’t as smooth as we’d like it to be. Luckily we already know where the problem is, so it’s only a matter of days to get the neccessary modifications done. We’ve also planned to use the car’s own dashboard for speed and rpm display along with refining other aspects in order to get the feeling right. Our friends at Kajak Game Development Lab are also planning a driving simulator for this project…
That’s all for this time, have a good one!
- eimink
6 Comments for this entry
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Driving the car without going anywhere - Hack a Day
April 24th, 2010 on 01:27[...] video game controller is a factory fresh VW. Much like the racing simulator from earlier in the week, the video game data [...]
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Bookmarks for April 27th through May 7th « Stuff.za.net
May 7th, 2010 on 16:54[...] Volkswagen Scirocco 2009 as a game controller – nippe.teknopapu.net Turning a VW into a game controller by hacking into the CAN bus. [...]
April 28th, 2010 on 12:11
How did you get the vehicle’s can message IDs? Did you use the OBD-II PID messages or actual messages from the can bus? Usually, manufacturers do not release the can bus message IDs.
April 28th, 2010 on 14:38
PID queries give out almost all of the information needed to do this kind of setup, apart from the things read from the ABS controller since it needs to be accessed through the gateway box. We have good connections with local VW retail and service shop and also to the instances that train their service personnel… ;)
June 17th, 2010 on 08:30
Hi,I wanted to congrat u on ur great success.All this is new to me so i started reading the terms u mentioned and i got a pretty much good idea.
Thanks for giving us light :D
So are u willing to share this software with anyone interested in developing or using it.
Even if not i would like to buy your final product to sell it in the middle east…and don’t worry about the price just name the price u want…just on the condition that u can make sure it can be applied on multi users, cause this can acctually be a very potential project with a lot of money income if u get my point.
I will wait for your reply on my email…and believe me i am serious about buying your developed software.
best regards.
June 23rd, 2010 on 17:11
The software is not for sale and it is not open source either. A product based on the software might be coming later on – if there is enough interest and/or suitable business partners to work with on this project. For further enquiries about the software you can find our contact info at http://www.kajak.fi/atj
January 23rd, 2011 on 00:13
Sweet post.
February 16th, 2011 on 15:43
great video of the ralley test – the VW Scirocco looks good to0 (-;