Browsing around the Modelzone shop in Westfields today I saw that the Big Trak Jr was on sale for £9.99. I’ve been watching these for a while but thought they were a bit too much for me to just take apart, but at the sale price I picked one up.
As soon as I got back home I put some batteries in, had a play with it and then promptly began dissassembling it. They screws are easy to take out and a nice suprise is that the keypad on the Big Trak Jr is attached to the main board via a ribbon cable and a standard connector, this means it can be easily took out and plugged in to a breadboard with male header pins. Now delving deeper into the device it looks like the microncontroller is covered with epoxy, but that’s ok I’m not planning on using that anyway.
Now for the fun part, I plan to use my recently acquired Raspberry Pi to control the Big Trak, initially as just a clone for the original controller. Once this is working I then want to use Flask and python to build a set of restful web services that will be able to control the raspberry pi over the internet. Later I’d like to use opencv with a USB webcam to do some object tracking, and then go on from there really.
Expect some more updates soon!