Control your R/C vehicle from your iPhone
Posts tagged wishield
Driving over the internet…
Jan 22nd
A friend of mine (Tom) wanted to drive the car over the net, thought I’d give it a go as I haven’t even tried it yet. I’ve basically opened up my network so Tom has direct access to the car from a few URL’s, when he clicks on the URL’s I’m just messaging him telling him where which way the car’s going. The video’s below.
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.
That’s one sexy project box…
Jan 20th
Alright… so I went out to Maplin today and thought I’d splash out a bit and get a sexy project box, dremel grinder and some accessories… the result of this… that bad boy car’s completely wire free! Pictures below!
We'll take one already sexy looking project box...
Screw up a dremel grinder and cut some rudimentary holes in the fucker
And then drop a sexy piece of electronics in it (note, I didn't realise that the PCB's were blue, but I have to admit, they do compliment each other)
And then screw it on that bad boy Nissan GTR. Connect all of those wire things and plug in a battery, bobs your uncle!
Madame I'm ready for my close up...
It’s 1:47…
Jan 19th
It’s 1:47 in the morning, my eyes hurt and I’ve voluntarily been at it all day messing around with this WiShield… I can tell you that it’s finally paid off! I’ve managed to get the WiShield to give an XML response based on a URL passed to it… Basically creating a REST webservice on the WiShield/Arduino which will control the servo’s on the car over Wi-Fi from… you guessed it ANY application that can open a URL! I’ll post how I did it in the cook book in the morning when I’m awake!
The WiShield has arrived…
Jan 18th
Wi-Fi enabling the Arduino from a hacked LaFonera+ router has proved tedious and annoying at best. I wouldn’t recommend it to any one unless you’re willing to deal with the agro of having to spend vast amounts of time flashing it and rebooting it every time a serial connection to the Arduino board drops.
Luckily for this project I’ve always had a backup for the Wi-Fi connectivity, it was my second option purely because of the lack of ethernet port for an ethernet IP camera. This backup has arrived today… and I give you… WiShield!
It literally arrived today and took me 3 mins to set up and get on the network, it has two modes, ad-hoc and infrastructure, all of the configuration can be done in the arduino sketch and is pretty self explanatory from the comments.
You can purchase one from asynchlabs directly, their store didn’t seem to work so I got mine from here cutedigi.com no where in the UK seemed to have them, they do international shipping, mine took under a week to arrive.
