Week 2 Development Update
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| Tim, Abby, and Al working hard on their robot project |
It's been a busy week for Team Robot as everyone is finishing up with the assigned lab work and transitioning into group projects.
#goalzzzz
Our current goal is to command our robot to do simple commands such as moving forward and simple turns using an Android device as a brain/controller. So far, we have set up a soft blueprint of how we're going to communicate to our EV3 using leJos and Android Studios.
We plan to use a Bluetooth connection between the EV3 and an Android device. Between the two devices, we plan to set up a language that will "translate" input from the Android device that will send an output to the EV3 which will command and (hopefully) function the EV3. On a lower level, we brainstormed that a .txt file with move commands sent as Strings, such as "MOVE" from the Android device will be received on the EV3 which will do a function if its document reader receives the string "MOVE".
Though, if we plan to map our movements like this, our EV3 will just have a long list of if-else statements of case sensitive strings (which probably doesn't seem too elegant). To resolve that, we'll create a class that does all the translating for us so hopefully we can send a command such as "MOVE, 30, FORWARD" which will be delimited by a comma and sent as parameter "MOVE", specifying a move forward command, "30" which will correlate a distance for the EV3, and "FORWARD" which tells the direction for EV3 to go in (based on where its front is facing, or perhaps we'll impose our own coordinate system of what's North, South, East, and West).
but.. but how?
We plan to use a Bluetooth connection between the EV3 and an Android device. Between the two devices, we plan to set up a language that will "translate" input from the Android device that will send an output to the EV3 which will command and (hopefully) function the EV3. On a lower level, we brainstormed that a .txt file with move commands sent as Strings, such as "MOVE" from the Android device will be received on the EV3 which will do a function if its document reader receives the string "MOVE".
Though, if we plan to map our movements like this, our EV3 will just have a long list of if-else statements of case sensitive strings (which probably doesn't seem too elegant). To resolve that, we'll create a class that does all the translating for us so hopefully we can send a command such as "MOVE, 30, FORWARD" which will be delimited by a comma and sent as parameter "MOVE", specifying a move forward command, "30" which will correlate a distance for the EV3, and "FORWARD" which tells the direction for EV3 to go in (based on where its front is facing, or perhaps we'll impose our own coordinate system of what's North, South, East, and West).
What we've done so far
So far, Tim and Al have found ways to programmatically establish Bluetooth connection between two android devices and even send files between the two. This calls for using Android's Intent objects to send and receive files. We are hoping we can just send an Intent with a .txt file to the leJos to have it read and translate the file sent to it.
Abby has been researching how to read an input stream of a file on the leJos side. Though, finding help material is hard as much documentation is for the NXT model of the Lego Robot versus ours (the EV3). Abby has managed to find some documentation on reading input files, but will have to find a way to translate it to work for the EV3.
tl;dr everything's lookin' pretty good so far.
