W14: Networking

I get to this one assignment very late in the game and still with heavy restrictions on Fab Lab access.

I have a Bluetooth module laying around and I will try to connect it to my Hello Fab Kit board which I created for the Final Project and to my mobile device to send commands between them.

The connections

Hello Fab Kit Board

On the mobile device

The bluetooth board indicated its availability for pairing with the blinking LED:

I'm using the free Arduino Blue app to connect to the Bluetooth module. I tried many others, but this one was by far the best.

Once both devices are connected to each other, the LED stops blinking.

Sending messages through the network

Setting up the code

The Hello Fab Kit board will keep listening to the serial port to recognise two different commands:

"1" to turn the LED on
"0" to turn the LED off

Sending the commands

Once connected, the mobile app has a basic terminal to send commands:

From there, a textfield allows for sending commands from the device to the Hello Fab Kit board:

Integration

It turned out to be much simpler than I expected, but that is also because I learned (and suffered) a lot with serial bus comms on the Interface Programming assignment