A version of Scalextrix has been developed with the slot cars controlled by shouting down a VoIP line.

The game is the brain child of developer Christopher Paretti. The volume of a voice signal is processed and hooked up to act as the equivalent of squeezing the trigger on the perennial children's favourite.

The subtlety of the manual version's control system is not lost though; Paretti suggests steady chanting may be better than intermittent barking down the phone.

Chris explains the more technical aspects of his innovation thus:

The project takes advantage of Asterisk, the open source PBX, to take in the phone data and spit that out to a Java based soft phone. This soft phone takes in a SIP stream which I then take amplitude data from. I use that data, scale it a bit an send it serially to an Arduino board.

The ciruit itself is quite simple. It uses a transistor to send voltage to the track (12v DC), and I use the incoming serial data to PWM...this allowing for a difference in speed.

So there you go. Chris' site with accompanying wholesome family fun pictorial accompaniment is here.

Parents can look forward to damaged ear drums next Christmas it seems. ®