Control your R/C vehicle from your iPhone
Posts tagged widrive
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.
