RoboPad-plusplus / RoboPad++

RoboPad++ is an Android app that consists on a robots controller via the device's Bluetooth. You have several types of robots with differents types of control for each of them. The robots must be controlled by an Arduino board with a Bluetooth module.

Right now, the type of robot that you can choose are the printbots designed in the Bq company or whichever robot with an Arduino board.

You can use a 3D printer to create your printbot (Pollywog, Beetle and Rhino). You can find the printable parts and the code of each one in http://diwo.bq.com/tag/printbot/

You can use the generic robot controller if you create your own robot with its own Arduino code or if you wants to add more functionality to the other ones, through the buttons 1 to 6.

The buttons send the following character to the Arduino board:

Button 1 - '1'
Button 2 - '2'
Button 3 - '3'
Button 4 - '4'
Button 5 - '5'
Button 6 - '6'

The difference with the RoboPad app is that now you have the new functionality of scheduling the robot's movements! You can add the movements that you want for your robot, rearrange them and remove them one by one or all at once. When you are ready, you can send the movements to your robot and see how it moves as you chose.

The generic robot, Crab and Rhino options are hidden as their UI is not finished. Make them visible in the activity_select_robot.xml layout.

If you have any questions you can contact us by sending an email to diy@bq.com.

Features

1. Control Arduino robots via Bluetooth
2. 6 buttons in the generic robot mode for use as you want in your Arduino code
3. Schedule the movements of your robot and see how it moves according to them
4. Specific controls for the Pollywog, Beetle, Evolution, Crab and Rhino printbots of Bq. Now some of them can also change into the line follower mode, the light avoider mode or the obstacles avoider mode.
5. Management of the Bluetooth connection for battery saving

Installation

1. RoboPad++ depends on droid2ino and drag-drop-grid libraries. Clone both repositories:

   git clone https://github.com/bq/droid2ino.git
   git clone https://github.com/bq/drap-drop-grid.git

2. Install the droid2ino library in your local repository:

   cd droid2ino/droid2ino
   gradle install

3. Install the drag-drop-grid library in your local repository:

   cd drag-drop-grid/drag-drop-grid
   gradle install

4. Install Android Studio and Gradle.

5. If you use a 64 bits Linux, you will need to install ia32-libs-multiarch:

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get upgrade
   sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch 

6. Clone the RoboPad-plusplus repository:

   git clone https://github.com/bq/robopad-plusplus.git

7. In Android Studio go to File > Open and select the previous RoboPad cloned project.
8. Upload the Arduino code to your robot. You can find it in the Arduino folder of this project or in DIWO web of Bq
9. In order to install the firmware of the Crab printbot that you will find in the Arduino folder, you have to copy the Oscillator folder (that is in the Oscillator_Lib folder) in to the libraries folder in the folder where you have installed the Arduino program. You can find more detailed info for doing this in the documentation of the Arduino web.

Requirements

• Java JDK
• Android Studio

• Maven. If you use Ubuntu:

  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install maven

• Gradle version 3.3
• Arduino IDE
• Arduino board with Bluetooth

Limitations

• In order to fix the problem when receiving the messages from the Arduino board of obtaining empty strings or divided strings, the droid2ino library uses escape characters in order to obtaining the entire message well.

  • Start escape characters: &&
  • End escape characters : %%

  So an example of a message written by the Arduino program for a generic robot would be:

  &&I write from Arduino%%

• The generic robot has 6 buttons that sends the commands '1', '2', '3', '4', '5' and '6' respectively to the Arduino board.

License

RoboPad-plusplus is distributed in terms of GPL license. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for more details.