Control your R/C vehicle from your iPhone
Posts tagged iphone
New UI!
Apr 28th
I’ve just got the UI back from my designer buddy Kofi Brenya absolutely awesome guy, been friends and doing business with him for many years. Any way! Here’s the new UI for WiDrive.
Features include:
- Drag your finger on the right to control acceleration, if you let go it decelerates back to 0, it acts as a dead mans switch
- Double tap to switch to reverse mode
- The iPhone’s battery is represented by the battery indicator on the right
- Same steering controls as before, use the iPhone as a steering wheel
- Of course there’s the sexy push to start button!
- Indicators flash when turning left and right
- If there’s an error, the handbrake warning light comes on
That’s about it really, comments and suggestions would be much appreciated!
What a week!
Apr 22nd
Last Thursday I took this project to my uni’s (Bournemouth) sports hall to take it for a spin. I can say that after 6 months of development, money wasting, blood swear and tears it nearly made me shed a tear to see this fully working with no issues whatsoever (apart from the camera static) in the hands of some of Bournemouth’s most dangerous and incapable drivers. Even worse I’d not been in a sports hall for a while and had forgotten about how polished and pristine the floor normally is.
Any way enough talk here’s the video!
WiDrive Open Beta from Gavin Williams on Vimeo.
If you want to get your hands and try this out, make sure you keep upto date with our Bournemouth University Graduation show taking place at the end of May this year! @gotoandplay2010
I wanna try and get this on the front page of Digg so… DON’T FORGET TO DIGG THIS POST! 
New Board, New Ideas
Mar 4th
I know I’ve been away for a while but this is why…
On the left you can see the old Arduino and on the right you can see the new streamlined Black Widow from Async Labs, which is just a modified Arduino with WiFi built into it. I’ve also decided to go down the sockets route to communicate between the Arduino and the iPhone, all is going well! I’ve started creating the iPhone app, which is looking pretty nifty, when you turn the phone the steering wheel turns too! And it sends commands to the Arduino. I’ve had a few problems where the servo’s jitter from the commands from the iPhone but have found that connecting directly to the Arduino over WiFi in ad-hoc mode seems to have mitigated this.
Using the serial out on the Arduino I was able to see what values were being received from the iPhone, obviously trying to analyse a load of numbers (several thousand of them) is pretty boring, and I have better things to do with my life. So I downloaded  Plot for the mac, which will turn a load of data into a graph (before you ask, Numbers and Excel can’t process stupid amounts of data quickly to display them in a graph, even on my dual 2.26ghz quad core mac pro). So below are the fruits of my labour, there are still a few anomalies as you can see, but it’s getting there, once the jitter’s all gone I’ll feel a bit more confident and hook up the speed controller!
Just imagine that those curves are from me tilting the phone.
How Annoying!
Jan 22nd
Alright, so I’ve been working on the iPhone app today and thought I’d start with something simple, you know, “press button car go forward” kind of thing child’s play… one might think. Well I was wrong! Unfortunately from my testing the WiShield can only handle 1 http request per second, in laymen’s terms think of it as a really juddery movie, you know when you watch a movie on megavideo or something and it’s constantly stopping to buffer because your stupid house mate is taking up all of the bandwidth downloading hardcore porn, think of how frustrating that is for you, and you’re just watching the thing.
Any way! Now I need to find some other way to communicate with the arduino that’s not to processor intensive. Apparently the WiShield supports other TCP/IP protocols such as UDP and Sockets, once I find out what these things mean I’ll get back to you, to be honest I’m quite surprised I got this far in the first place, I haven’t got a clue what I’m actually doing, I guess I’m just leaving it to fate and hoping everything just falls into place, which it normally does!
On a positive note though, I’ve created my first useful ugly iPhone app today, it’s not pretty I’m not gonna lie, but it’s reading the accelerometers on the iPhone, I’ll translate this into degrees so that when I turn the iPhone the wheels turn too and when you tilt the iPhone forward the car goes forward, and when you tilt it backwards… well I think you can see where I’m going here. Luckily my Nissan GTR kit came with some headlights, so I’ll add a lights button on the app too, so you can be all stealth and then BOOM! LED’s come on! And Dan’s been helping me paint the car, so it’s looking pretty sexy right now.
Any way, that’s it for me for today, it’s 3:00 in the morning, and I’m pretty sad to be on here to be honest, I should be in bed or out getting drunk.
