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.
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