Now that the Nepomuk review is finished I've had some time to play with the OpenMoko FreeRunner. The state of the standard phone-software is abysmal, but the hard-ware is cool AND it runs python :) Since Kaiserslautern was covered in snow this weekend and it was not so tempting to go out I spent a few hours playing with the accelerometers. The actual idea for what to do started with seeing this screenshot:
of the game Zing on OneMoreLevel.com. The game is nothing like I thought it was, I imagined the small things to be very abstract cars and not bugs trying to eat you. Oh well.
Anyway, within a few hours and some stealing Creative Commons content later I had a crappy car game:
controlled by the accelerometer of the FreeRunner, i.e. lie the FreeRunner flat, start the game, now when you tilt the FreeRunner in some direction the car drives that way! Trust me, the scrreenshot really does not do it justice, the feeling you get frome the immediate control and the amazing sound-effects is… well pretty much just like driving in real life!
Download tarball, untar on FreeRunner, make sure you have python-pygame and libpng3 installed and run python car.py. Press AUX to exit. The code is of course not pretty, but does at least show some basics of Accelerometer handling.
