IRL Chrome T-Rex Game Powered By Raspberry Pi Zero

Wire mess replaced by a custom shield with Motor Drivers, Regulator, DFPlayer and E-Paper Connector

In all started in one weekend. My life-partner Ariella and I went to GeekCon, a weekend hackathon devoted to building useless (but nevertheless super-cool) maker projects.

We had an ambitious goal: we wanted to build Chrome’s infamous no-internet dinosaur game, but in real-life. We spent the weekend building a prototype with Arduino and some parts that we ordered in advance (such as PCB for the T-Rex):

In GeekCon, this is what we call success

Eventually, by the end of the weekend, we had a semi-working prototype. It wasn’t very reliable, the cacti wouldn’t go back to the beginning of the track, and it was trust based — the game had no way to detect if you hit a cactus. Nevertheless, the children who attended the GeekCon faire event at the end of that weekend loved it:

I’m Going to The Chrome Dev Summit! 🦕

The prototype was fun to play and motivated me to keep working on that project. We shared the video with the organizers of the annual Chrome developer event, the Chrome Dev Summit, and they invited us to present the game in the event that year. Exciting!

A random shot of my working desk during the month before Chrome Dev Summit

We had about one month to the event, and I spent all my free time improving the hardware: replacing the cheap DC motors with stepper motors, revamping the jump mechanism, creating a loop so the cacti would automatically go back to the start of the track, making the button wireless, and so on.