MobileRobotics (May 2005)
"In 2005 there was not much information available on programming Bluetooth on the Java Micro Edition and the PalmOS platform - suffice to say the quality of the sources varied. That's where we came in, to contribute to the community”
mobileRobotics
MobileRobotics is a good example on new innovative technology. We created a wireless Lego Mindstorm robot that could be controlled by a regular cell phone. The cell phone was connected over Bluetooth to a Palm hand held on the device, which then translated everything from Bluetooth to infrared and relayed it to the Mindstorm control unit. My task was to create the software for the cell phone, document and make the main website.
The project was quite a success and the feedback very positive. Since it’s release in may 2005 The source code has been downloaded more then 2100 times and the sitea has had over 287 000 hits.
We chose this subject due to the fact that all three of us had a vast interest in the evolving, new wireless technologies and because it would oppose a real challenge. It could also be a chance for us to provide documentation and code to open source programmers, we thought, since it’s quite difficult to find extensive applicable code examples using Java Micro Edition/Wireless Edition and the PalmOS C++ Bluetooth library.
We thought it would be a way to contribute to the communites of Java, C++ and Lego Mindstorms.
In 2005 there was not much information available on programming Bluetooth on the Java Micro Edition and the PalmOS platform - suffice to say the quality of the sources varied. Hence a great deal of time went into research and pure trial-and-error.
Questions we had to get answered regarded a variety of protocols, standards, cross-platform reliability, wireless capabilities and optimal mechanical solutions. To narrow these questions, we first discussed what standards we were interested in such as Bluetooth, IR and JSR-82, and how well these would co-operate when implemented in two different languages on two different platforms. We looked into all information we could find in forums, on websites and in books.
Most of all it was easy to get help and support in almost every open-source community. We had knowledge of both Java and C++ programming, but to program for - to us - completely different platforms than Win32 was quite a challenge.
More information, images and movie clips can be found on mobilerobotics.sf.net
