Anki Overdrive

October 5, 2017 - 2 min read

A quick Overview about Anki Overdrive

I will give you a quick overview about Anki Overdrive. It is an intelligent battle racing system that lets you explore the power of artificial intelligence (AI).

#1: The Hardware is dumb

Each vehicle only consists of a 50MHz processor, infrared camera, Bluetooth Low Energy controller, an approx. 30 minutes battery and a rear wheel drive. The infrared camera is used to scan the infrared markings on the track pieces at 500Hz (each 2ms) to determine their position.

But: The vehicles do not know if there is something around them - they just decode the track markings and exchange information with the server.

Software decides whether a vehicle should change its motion.

#2: You can program it

The common use case is to use the included Android and iOS apps. In addition to that, Anki open sourced its communication protocol, based on Bluetooth Low Energy. It also comes with a C based command line tool, which is easy to use. In short: it lets you communicate with the vehicles (change their speed in mm/sec, change their lane, ...).

If you want to write the software for controlling the vehicles, you must find a Bluetooth Low Energy SDK. For Java, there is tinyB, which is an API for BLE GATT, using BlueZ over DBus.

#3: You can print your own tracks

If you do not want to buy a new track, print it. There is an open source software for this use case. I have tested it - successfully.

But: Print it on a large paper and be careful about sticking it together precisely! Otherwise, the vehicles may delocalize.

#4: There is a vehicle test mode

Pressing the grey button on the downside quick and often (should be 5x) causes the vehicle to drive in a police-like behavior. You can see this mode in the video above.