Welcome to the Extra Lives of Developers — a hopefully regular segment where I can introduce you to some of the people who make games with Activision but have a life of their own besides. As I meet more game developers and learn about their interesting hobbies and personal passions, I’ll grill them and serve the results up here.
Dan Howery, Robomodo
Main Life: User Interface Engineering Lead for Tony Hawk: SHRED
Extra Life: Remote-control car hacker
Dan and Roxy
Most kids play with their toys until they break or fall apart from overuse. The latter was the case with my beloved remote-control car — it gave everything it had. But Dan Howery’s toy story is different: his boyhood R/C car was patiently parked in his parents’ closet, awaiting the day when he would upgrade it to be…something more. Over the last few months, Howery has added Bluetooth connectivity, a controllable camera, and — much to the chagrin of his dog Roxy — a piercing siren-like horn. But most interesting to gamers is the new control scheme: the whole contraption is now controlled via an Xbox 360 controller.
By day, Dan helps create the user interface bits for Robomodo‘s upcoming Tony Hawk: SHRED. “Since high school, I have been fascinated with the concept of using a computer to take a vision that is stuck in your head and transform it into something tangible that others can see and experience,” he says. But wasn’t the kind of kid to disassemble his toys just to see how they worked. “I was a very orderly child and taking something apart would have been at odds with my compulsion to take good care of my toys,” he says. “That’s probably why the 15-year old R/C car still worked when I dragged it out of a closet at my parents’ house,” he says with a laugh.
Once he’d cracked the candy shell, he dug into the delicious innards — and replaced them with an Arduino brain instead, leveraging the power of the popular open-source prototyping platform. “I started messing around with the Arduino in January,” he says. “It was designed with artists, designers, and newbie electrical engineers in mind — the Arduino effectively lowers the barrier to entry into hobby electronics because it crams a lot of complex functionality into an easy to use package that works right out of the box.”
Dan and gadgetry
Combining Arduino’s ease of use with his programming experience, it wasn’t long before he’d created a wireless Bluetooth connection between the car and his laptop, with steering handed by a wired 360 controller. That choice was easy; he’d done something similar for one of his collegiate programming projects, Betty and Buster’s Battle Kart. “It was developed on and for a PC, but there was no way that mouse and keyboard controls were going to do the game justice,” he says. But a publicly available code library for Xbox 360 controller support solved that problem and served as a good solution for the R/C project, too.
As the months passed and videos were uploaded, the car gained a refined control scheme, its signature cyclopean camera (“the coolest part is undoubtedly the camera, which allows you to drive the car like a video game, using the laptop screen”) and a name — the Creeper Bot.
“I was really surprised with how many hits I got on the Youtube video,” says Howery. “The video got picked up on Hackaday.com, then Gizmodo, then Engadget and a few other blogs after that. I have never really contributed anything to the internet before, so this was definitely a cool experience.” If you’d like to build your own Creeper Bot, he’s archived the project’s development with a blog.
But like all good hobby projects, the Creeper Bot isn’t quite complete. Howery has plenty of ideas he’d like to try out, from a stronger wireless transmitter to…a water cannon. “I thought it would be cool to add some sort of weapon to the car,” he says. “I looked at some Nerf guns, but could not find any that could be easily triggered electrically as well as fit on the car.” Run, Roxy, run!
Dan and some guy
Plus, the future isn’t limited to freaking out his four-legged friend with hacked four-wheelers. “When I get some free time I am going to start experimenting with some electroluminescent wire,” he says. “It looks like a glow stick, but it can be powered electronically and bent into shapes. I plan on creating a Daft Punk or Tron-esque outfit for Halloween. Other than that, I have been thinking about possibly making some cool toys for my nephews. I could possibly augment an action figure playset with some cool sounds or triggers.”
Just tell them to take care of those toys — you never know when they’ll come in handy. “If I had not had an old R/C car tucked away in a closet, I probably would not have shelled out the cash to buy a new car and this project would have never gotten off the ground,” he laughs. “I am such a cheapskate.”
