Bluetooth Remote Control （1）

Published:2011/8/3 20:45:00 Author:Phyllis From:SeekIC

From your PDA or mobile phone

By Richard Hoptroff

Bluetooth is a huge commercial success but so far hobbyists and la workers have been barred from access to ready-made modules for this wonderful new medium. The reason is simple: manufacturers like to treat their products as black boxes and are only interested in their 100-k/day production lines in the Far East or China. We oppose this attitude by publishing this article, written using the motto: Bluetooth modules for everyone! A tracking robot does the trick.

Flick through any electronics magazine - professional or hobbyist - and you will see a wide range of single-board computers and microcontroller boards. For many applications, they make product development so much simpler than it used to be, say, 5 or 10 years ago. Attach a few auxiliary components and a control panel, write the computer program, and you’re finished. What makes the process easier is that the computer board is programmable, so one off-the-shelf component can be applied to many tasks. Could this concept be taken even further? A few auxiliary components will always be needed in any product, but what about the control panel (user interface)? Couldn’t an off-the-shelf programmable component be made to replace custom control panels on electronic devices like PDAs, GSM, but also custom-made microcontroller systems?

The ’FlexiPanel BASIC Stamp Edition’ module from FlexiPanel Ltd. could provide the answer. In this article we’ll concentrate on the Bluetooth version of Flexipanel, see the Device Pinout inset. Using Bluetooth radio (at 2.4 GHz), it asks a remote device within range — say, a mobile phone, a notebook PC, PDA or another handheld computer—to create the required control panel (or, if you like, ’GUI’) on its display. The module has a Class-1 radio, so the remote device can be up to 100 m away. The module operates at TTL levels, and we are informed that a standalone RS232 device will soon also be in production.




A user within radio range of the Flexi-panel-Bluetooth module may connect to the appliance at any time using any Bluetooth-enabled device. The device will display the required control panel, but the panel’s appearance may vary according to the remote device used. Some examples will be shown later.

The software on the remote devices is the same for each application and does not require customization or re-installation. It is freely downloadable from www.flexipanel.com. At the time of writing, Pocket PCs, Windows PCs, and Smartphones (e.g. SPV E200 from Orange) software are supported. Software for Palm Operating System and Java phones supporting the JABWT standard (e.g. Nokia 6600 and Sony Ericsson P900) has also been released.

Projects with Bluetooth control

Let’s not get carried away by new-fangled technology like Bluetooth-enabled GSM phones and PDAs. Using an example we will demonstrate that applications can be developed for the FlexiPanel-Bluetooth combination that are simple enough to be tackled by relative beginners. The example, a simple tracking robot, employs a specially adapted version of the Elektor Electronics Board of Education originally featured in the September 1999 issue and the world-famous Parallax BS2p BASIC Stamp. Parallax Inc., who supply the Basic Stamp, also distribute the FlexiPanel module through their authorized dealers (in the UK: Milford Instruments).

In case you didn’t know, the BASIC Stamp can be programmed using the BASIC programming language from any PC computer using a serial cable. The same link is used to program the control panel into the FlexiPanel-Bluetooth module used as part of the project: a robot controller with route tracking.

The BASIC programs and FlexiPanel designer data files used in this and two more projects are available from Elektor Electronics as free software downloads. The other two projects are an access system and a temperature logger, they are not discussed in this article.

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