My son Ben turns 7 this year, and for his birthday party we (we= Ben and me) are building a roller coaster simulator, The party isn't until July, so progress isn't fast and furious yet. My plan is to have 1 or 2 kids sit on the motion platform in a single roller coaster car, and select the coaster of their choice with a wiimote (this is all driven by, essentially, an HTML page on the same server as apache). Selecting the coaster dishes to a program that I've written that loads a script file associated with the chosen coaster. This script file contains all the time, pitch, and roll info for a video taken from the front seat of a roller coaster. I'm running mplayer in slave mode, and as I pass the time indicated in the script file, the appropriate action takes place.
So far, here's what I've got:
1. Roller coaster videos- I've got about 10 that I can use for this- got them from Theme Park Review.
2. Backend program to drive it all- written in plain old C. At appropriate video times, it dishes the position commands out of a USB serial port.
3. REALLY big homemade servos built and tuned. Found some Klauber gearmoters that my company was scrapping in some other equipment, and I couldn't find anything wrong with the motors. I'll put up more details on these, as well as the feedback and control method if anyone is interested.
4. Motion platform underway. It's 3' x 3' (just short of 1Mx1M), but I haven't gotten the seats built yet, or the servos installed. Waiting for some linkage parts.
Here's a screenshot of the beginning of one of the coasters:
