Bluetooth Sumo Bot
Robotics From No Where
Posts: 9
First off I would thank everyone on the forums & the parallax crew, though this is my first post Ive been reading the forums for months and everyone has been a big help.
I am posting this to address the issue of to little documentation and examples of how to control your robot from your computer using bluetooth. Though it is very well documented in the manual, their is little example in how to have it interact with other programs. First off this isnt tring to point out any faults in anything, in the software,hardware or documents used everything was fine. The only problem I have faced for the past month or more has been little in detail on the exact project I have been working on.
This project began when I wanted an active dynamic battle A.I. for my robot. Of course I couldnt have a serial cable dragging in the ring so I choose to go with the eb500 bluetooth. I also choose to use Realbasic for the pc side thanks to its multi-platform abillity and its just general quick easy programming. The one major snag I had in all of this was to get the realbasic program to talk to the eb500 wirelessly. Oh I should note I was using a powerbook for the pc side & a bs2 for the sumo side (just incase it didnt occure to some sumo's use bs2 or they didnt know).
In this post I include a very basic example source for realbasic(the pc side of the programming), bs2 example code, and some basic instructions on how I got it up and working for myself.
*Note there is no A.I. for the realbasic side, only a basic movement controller to show how basic movement works, everything else is up to you to do
Setting everything up is easy enough, download the bs2 code to your bs2, compile the realbasic program and run it. The only thing that has to be done before all of this is some quick bluetooth settings set on your mac (sorry windows users, havnt tried this on my windows xp machine yet and dont know what has to be done for it yet).
First make sure your computer's bluetooth is discoverable
Next get the mac address of your bluetooth device and replace the "con 00:14:51:4d[noparse]:ab:[/noparse]bb" with "con yourmacaddress"
Download the example bs2 code to your bs2
You should be able to see your eb500 device on your browse device list
Open your Bluetooth Prefrences
Click on eb500 in the device list and click the button "Edit Serial Ports..."
Click add serial device *the "+" button*
To make it easier for myself I changed the Port name to "eb500" but you can change it to whatever you wish
On port type select "Modem"
Now click Apply
You should now be able to control the movement of your sumo bot (or boebot theoreticly, dont own one so dont qoute me) with the realbasic program.
All code and instructions are provided AS-IS, it worked for me but might not work for you.
Any comments, suggestions, or whatever would be greatly appreciated.
Post Edited (DarkSin) : 12/15/2005 8:43:24 AM GMT
I am posting this to address the issue of to little documentation and examples of how to control your robot from your computer using bluetooth. Though it is very well documented in the manual, their is little example in how to have it interact with other programs. First off this isnt tring to point out any faults in anything, in the software,hardware or documents used everything was fine. The only problem I have faced for the past month or more has been little in detail on the exact project I have been working on.
This project began when I wanted an active dynamic battle A.I. for my robot. Of course I couldnt have a serial cable dragging in the ring so I choose to go with the eb500 bluetooth. I also choose to use Realbasic for the pc side thanks to its multi-platform abillity and its just general quick easy programming. The one major snag I had in all of this was to get the realbasic program to talk to the eb500 wirelessly. Oh I should note I was using a powerbook for the pc side & a bs2 for the sumo side (just incase it didnt occure to some sumo's use bs2 or they didnt know).
In this post I include a very basic example source for realbasic(the pc side of the programming), bs2 example code, and some basic instructions on how I got it up and working for myself.
*Note there is no A.I. for the realbasic side, only a basic movement controller to show how basic movement works, everything else is up to you to do
Setting everything up is easy enough, download the bs2 code to your bs2, compile the realbasic program and run it. The only thing that has to be done before all of this is some quick bluetooth settings set on your mac (sorry windows users, havnt tried this on my windows xp machine yet and dont know what has to be done for it yet).
First make sure your computer's bluetooth is discoverable
Next get the mac address of your bluetooth device and replace the "con 00:14:51:4d[noparse]:ab:[/noparse]bb" with "con yourmacaddress"
Download the example bs2 code to your bs2
You should be able to see your eb500 device on your browse device list
Open your Bluetooth Prefrences
Click on eb500 in the device list and click the button "Edit Serial Ports..."
Click add serial device *the "+" button*
To make it easier for myself I changed the Port name to "eb500" but you can change it to whatever you wish
On port type select "Modem"
Now click Apply
You should now be able to control the movement of your sumo bot (or boebot theoreticly, dont own one so dont qoute me) with the realbasic program.
All code and instructions are provided AS-IS, it worked for me but might not work for you.
Any comments, suggestions, or whatever would be greatly appreciated.
Post Edited (DarkSin) : 12/15/2005 8:43:24 AM GMT
