mini-project: Gestures controlling a Minecraft X-wing

This post is part of an occasional series of post about Computing projects carried out by people within Northamptonshire. 

This posts looks at combining Raspberry Pi, gesture control and Star Wars in  Minecraft.

figure 1

This post builds on an earlier project to get a simple X-Wing into Minecraft on a Raspberry Pi.  The goal was get Python to build and move the X-Wing. Details of this project can be found here.

In this post the additional of Pirmoroni's Skywriter HAT included to allow movements of a hand to enable the X-Wing to take-off, land, move forward or backward.

It builds on ideas from the book Adventures in Minecraft on using Python and Minecraft with a Raspberry Pi.

figure 2

The Skywriter is a Raspberry Pi HAT (see figure 2) that allows positional information of the hand just above the board to detected. In this project it is detecting flicks of the hand up, down, or across the board to determine the direction of motion (see video above)

Before you start, to use the Skywriter, in the terminal you need to add curl -sSL get.pimoroni.com/skywriter | bash

Now we can start building. To start with we just placed the X-Wing above the player by placing blocks in the shape (roughly) of the X-Wing based around the method MinecraftShape (see Chapter 8 of Adventures in Minecraft ).

figure 3

• Find the position of the player;
• To avoid building on top the player the starting position of the X-Wing is set by:
• add 5 to the x position of the player;
• add 10 to the y position of the player(The bit I have to keep reminding myself is the y-axis is vertical.);
• add 5 to the z position of the player;
• Using these values build using, Wool blocks, the X-Wing - 0 for white, and 14 for red blocks;
• If a flick starts at the top of the board (or "north") this moves the X-Wing down towards the ground;
• If a flick starts at the bottom of the board (or "south") this moves the X-Wing vertically up;
• If a flick starts on the right of the board (or "east") the X-Wing moves backwards horizontally;
• if a flick starts on the left of the board (or "west") the X-Wing moves forward.

from mcpi.minecraft import Minecraft

from mcpi import block

import mcpi.minecraftstuff as minecraftstuff

import time

import skywriter

import signal

mc=Minecraft.create()

xPos=mc.player.getTilePos()

xPos.x=xPos.x+5

xPos.y=xPos.y+5

xPos.z=xPos.z+5

xWingBlocks=[

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(0,0,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(-1,0,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(-2,0,0,block.WOOL.id,14),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(-3,0,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,0,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(0,1,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,1,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(2,0,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(2,1,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,2,-1,block.WOOL.id,14),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,2,1,block.WOOL.id,14),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,-1,-1,block.WOOL.id,14),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,-1,1,block.WOOL.id,14),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,3,-2,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,3,2,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,-2,-2,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,-2,2,block.WOOL.id,0)]

xWingShape=minecraftstuff.MinecraftShape(mc,xPos,xWingBlocks)

@skywriter.flick()

def flick(start,finish):

  if start=="south":

    for count in range(1,10):

      time.sleep(0.1)

      xWingShape.moveBy(0,1,0)

  if start=="west":

    for count in range(1,10):

      time.sleep(0.1)

      xWingShape.moveBy(-1,0,0)

  if start=="east":

    for count in range(1,10):

      time.sleep(0.1)

      xWingShape.moveBy(1,0,0)

  if start=="north":

    for count in range(1,10):

      time.sleep(0.1)

      xWingShape.moveBy(0,-1,0)

signal.pause()

Main text is adapted with permission from a post originally posted on http://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.co.uk/




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