Carbon Rover Part 3

In this final revision of the Carbon Rover Project I’ll be mostly taking about adding Bluetooth ® wireless technology control, using a not-so-expected method.

So what changed:

• Bluetooth Control
• Reset Switch
• Saturated all GPIO Pins, due to addition of HC-05 Bt. Controller
• Switching between Automated and Bluetooth Control.

You may want to check out the video before proceeding:

Bluetooth Hardware Implementation

So here is the reason this implementation took a lot of time, I was trying two methods:

1. On-Board Bluetooth

• Pros
  • More control and flexibility over Bluetooth functionality
  • Saves GPIO as the Bluetooth is integrated.
• Cons
  • Comparatively Complex to implement
  • Requires building a new App or implement a Bluetooth Controller
  • May be hard to replicate on other hardware

2. External Bluetooth-UART Module HC-05

• Pros
  • Easy to implement since its basically UART input
  • Easy to replicate
  • Commonly available apps on Android app store.
• Cons
  • No direct control over Device name or Password directly from the MCU.
  • Uses excess GPIO.

So as you would have guessed, I went with using an external HC-05 Bluetooth Module.

Bluetooth Software Implementation: Continuous Stream vs Single Char

The functionality that I needed was to press the “forward Button” and the rover moves as long as my finger stays on that button ans stops as soon as I lift my finger.

Now instead of sending a continuous stream of the char ‘f’, the more preferred method for me was to instead send a single character say ‘f’ when the button is presses and then send another character say ‘S’ as soon as the button gets “un-pressed”.

It has the same effect as streaming, but uses less bandwidth.

Conclusion

So this is basically the end on the Carbon Rover project, but that doesn’t mean I’ll never come back with another project using a similar concept… a Drone maybe? Who knows!