The things you can do with a Raspberry Pi are pretty damn incredible these days.
We’ve seen cars be modded to work with Mario Kart before, but unlike the previous attempt this version doesn’t involve driving a Porsche 911 around. It’s all done in a driveway, with the steering wheel acting as the analog stick, high beam to make the car jump, and the windshield wipers throw items forward.
It’s an older video that’s resurfaced of late, but it’s still awesome to see the ways people can hack things together. The N64 emulator is running off a Raspberry Pi with a CANbus shield, which interfaces with the OBD2 port in the Chevy Volt. A laptop’s needed as well, as the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have enough power to handle all of the data processing.
The method came from a hackathon event in Illinois last year, with the three creators winning the “Top Hardware Hacks”, “Best use of Natural User Interace” and “Most Technically Challenging Hack” awards for their efforts. The car used then was a Honda CR-V, which they bricked twice in the process (but managed to restore without it).
If you’d like to try “the most realistic Mario Kart 64” simulator ever, and are fully confident in your ability to unbrick your car in such an event, the source code is available on Github.
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One response to “Someone Modded A Chevy Volt To Play Mario Kart”
“which they bricked twice in the process” — now that would be a fun conversation with Honda.
“So, tell us what you were doing at the time the software went down”
“We were playing Mario Kart”