Electronics Team #4 Week February 23-29

Welcome back for another exciting edition of Hardware in a Computer Science class.

Micheal is now working hard with the seamstress slaves, getting a sense for how to work with the fabric, and getting a design together for the physical layer of the touchable armband. We're expecting a blog from him in about two weeks.

So, now that that's out of the way, let's discuss prototypes. This weeks prototype is intended to demonstrate Bluetooth communication between a hand made hardware device, and an android phone. For this we're using a recently acquired BlueSmiRF module from the Red Overlords known mainly as SparkFun. This exposes a serial interface (chosen by us to be 9600 baud), which is intended to be used as a bridge. Basically, the underlying electronics don't actually need to know anything about Bluetooth, if all goes according to design.

As it happens I have part of a research project lying around which outputs accelerometer signals at 9600 baud. The existing XBee interface was swapped out for the BlueSmiRF, and an android application was written to connect to the Bluetooth module and listen for the accelerometer packets. Success was encountered! We demonstrated in class the accelerometer being read by the Android phone, though some bugs (probably tied to the hasty repurposing of a Bluetooth chat example) were encountered.

Next week we'll post a video demonstration and recap of these two prototypes.

Android Dev Team #4 Week February 23-29

    At this point in time the toggle switches have been implemented. Each toggle button has a certain event callback procedure associated with it. I have used a vector of buttons and a vector of toggles. When each button gets pressed that buttons callback procedure is called. In this callback procedure the vector toggles in toggled for that certain button being pressed.
    While this is very tiresome and a repetitive task is has been done. The xml file for the layout is enormous, it consists the layer of horizontals rows, 9 to be exact. Each row consisting of the code for 9 xml toggles buttons. Each of these buttons must have a unique id, and some style settings.
    The 81 callback event functions was painstakingly done but has been finished as well.