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My previous post about Bluetooth Low Energy applications with RFDuino and Android presented a connectionless gas sensor. That prototype was based solely on BLE advertisements, no connection was built between the scanner device (Android phone or tablet) and the sensor. While this connection-less operation is advantageous for sensors that just broadcast their measurement data, more complex scenarios that e.g. require authentication or build a communication session cannot be implemented in this model. The prototype I am going to present in this post demonstrates connection-oriented operation between RFDuino and an Android application.
Watch this video to see what the application is about.
The story behind this motor boat project is that I bought this RC-controlled model boat while I worked in the UK. But when we moved back to Hungary, I lost the RC controller. So the boat had been unused for years until I realized how great it would be to use an Android device as a controller. Hence I quickly integrated the RFDuino with the motor boat's original control circuitry and wrote the necessary software. As you can see in the video, it has quite respectable range even though I did not dare go into the October water of Lake Balaton where the second part of the video was shot (water temperature: some 10 degrees centigrade).
First about the "hardware". I did not have the circuit schema of the original RC controller in the boat so I had to experiment a bit. By following the motors' cables I quickly found two three-legged stocky elements that looked like switching transistors (although the labels on them were not readable after all those years in service). I removed one end of the resistors that I thought connected the base of these transistors to the rest of the RC control circuit and tried out, how much current is needed to switch on the motors. To my pleasant surprise, 1 mA current was enough so I rather believe that these are actually not transistors but power switching ICs. Anyway, RFDuino outputs can provide 1 mA switching current so I just connected the other end of those removed resistors to two spare RFDuino I/O ports. Lo and behold, it worked. If RFDuino raises any of these pin to 1, the respective motor starts. One minor additional problem was about the power supply of RFDuino. The motor boat employs an 7.2 Volt battery and RFDuino needs 3.3 V. I added an LM1117-3.3V power regulator circuit between the battery and RFDuino and the "hardware" was ready.
Do you know about BLE concepts like service and characteristics? If not, please read this presentation for a quick introduction. In short: BLE services (also called GATT profiles) are composed of characteristics which are key-value pairs decorated by meta-information that the BLE specification calls descriptors. RFDuino with its default firmware is not able to implement any standard GATT profile except for its own custom GATT profile. This is a major disadvantage in product-level development but makes RFDuino code super-easy because the programmer does not have to deal with BLE details. In the RFDuino custom service, a "read" and a "write" characteristic is defined. Whatever the client (in our case, the Android application) writes into the "write" characteristic appears for the RFDuino code as incoming data callback. If the RFDuino code calls the RFduinoBLE.send(v) method, the data appears in the "read" characteristic. The Android client can register a callback for data manipulations of the "read" characteristic so it will receive callbacks when RFDuino code invokes the RFduinoBLE.send() method. There are additional callbacks for service connections and disconnections.
You can download the Android project and the RFDuino source here.
First about the RFDuino code. Beside the familiar setup() and loop() functions, you will see three functions characteristic to RFDuino. RFduinoBLE_onConnect() is called if a client connects to the RFDuino BLE service, RFduinoBLE_onDisconnect() is called on disconnection and RFduinoBLE_onReceive() is called when there is incoming data. There is only one complication in the code that requires explanation: this is a powerful motorboat and it can go out of BLE radio range very quickly. In the early versions the boat became uncontrollable in this case meaning that it just continued with the last command received. That was not a nice feature so I implemented a heartbeat message feature which is sent in every 5 second. The loop() method starts by sending the heartbeat to the client and goes to sleep. It wakes up after 5 seconds and if it finds that the client did not send back the heartbeat, it stops the motors. Otherwise the client just sends a bit mask about which motors to stop or start and the RFDuino just responds with the same mask informing the client that the motors were indeed started or stopped. This means that the arrows on the user interface showing which motors are running represent the actual state of the boat which is advantageous if something goes wrong.
Then about the Android side. The code starts by discovering the device. Once the device is discovered, we connect to the device with the connectGatt() method then discover its services with gatt.discoverServices() method. Once the service discovery callback arrives, we retrieve the RFDuino service (getService(), we expect this custom service) and obtain the characteristic handles (getCharacteristic()). We use the "read" characteristic's client configuration descriptor to enable notifications from the RFDuino server to the Android client so that we get a callback when the RFDuino side sends something to us.
Disconnection is worth detailing because there's an RFDuino speciality here. Normally, one can just disconnect from the service with the disconnect() method invocation. RFDuino however is left in a limbo state in this case: the BLE session is disconnected but the RFDuino application does not receive a callback and cannot accept a new connection request. The "disconnect" characteristic has to be written to (the value does not matter) for the RFDuino server to properly disconnect.
Watch this video to see what the application is about.
The story behind this motor boat project is that I bought this RC-controlled model boat while I worked in the UK. But when we moved back to Hungary, I lost the RC controller. So the boat had been unused for years until I realized how great it would be to use an Android device as a controller. Hence I quickly integrated the RFDuino with the motor boat's original control circuitry and wrote the necessary software. As you can see in the video, it has quite respectable range even though I did not dare go into the October water of Lake Balaton where the second part of the video was shot (water temperature: some 10 degrees centigrade).
First about the "hardware". I did not have the circuit schema of the original RC controller in the boat so I had to experiment a bit. By following the motors' cables I quickly found two three-legged stocky elements that looked like switching transistors (although the labels on them were not readable after all those years in service). I removed one end of the resistors that I thought connected the base of these transistors to the rest of the RC control circuit and tried out, how much current is needed to switch on the motors. To my pleasant surprise, 1 mA current was enough so I rather believe that these are actually not transistors but power switching ICs. Anyway, RFDuino outputs can provide 1 mA switching current so I just connected the other end of those removed resistors to two spare RFDuino I/O ports. Lo and behold, it worked. If RFDuino raises any of these pin to 1, the respective motor starts. One minor additional problem was about the power supply of RFDuino. The motor boat employs an 7.2 Volt battery and RFDuino needs 3.3 V. I added an LM1117-3.3V power regulator circuit between the battery and RFDuino and the "hardware" was ready.
Do you know about BLE concepts like service and characteristics? If not, please read this presentation for a quick introduction. In short: BLE services (also called GATT profiles) are composed of characteristics which are key-value pairs decorated by meta-information that the BLE specification calls descriptors. RFDuino with its default firmware is not able to implement any standard GATT profile except for its own custom GATT profile. This is a major disadvantage in product-level development but makes RFDuino code super-easy because the programmer does not have to deal with BLE details. In the RFDuino custom service, a "read" and a "write" characteristic is defined. Whatever the client (in our case, the Android application) writes into the "write" characteristic appears for the RFDuino code as incoming data callback. If the RFDuino code calls the RFduinoBLE.send(v) method, the data appears in the "read" characteristic. The Android client can register a callback for data manipulations of the "read" characteristic so it will receive callbacks when RFDuino code invokes the RFduinoBLE.send() method. There are additional callbacks for service connections and disconnections.
You can download the Android project and the RFDuino source here.
First about the RFDuino code. Beside the familiar setup() and loop() functions, you will see three functions characteristic to RFDuino. RFduinoBLE_onConnect() is called if a client connects to the RFDuino BLE service, RFduinoBLE_onDisconnect() is called on disconnection and RFduinoBLE_onReceive() is called when there is incoming data. There is only one complication in the code that requires explanation: this is a powerful motorboat and it can go out of BLE radio range very quickly. In the early versions the boat became uncontrollable in this case meaning that it just continued with the last command received. That was not a nice feature so I implemented a heartbeat message feature which is sent in every 5 second. The loop() method starts by sending the heartbeat to the client and goes to sleep. It wakes up after 5 seconds and if it finds that the client did not send back the heartbeat, it stops the motors. Otherwise the client just sends a bit mask about which motors to stop or start and the RFDuino just responds with the same mask informing the client that the motors were indeed started or stopped. This means that the arrows on the user interface showing which motors are running represent the actual state of the boat which is advantageous if something goes wrong.
Then about the Android side. The code starts by discovering the device. Once the device is discovered, we connect to the device with the connectGatt() method then discover its services with gatt.discoverServices() method. Once the service discovery callback arrives, we retrieve the RFDuino service (getService(), we expect this custom service) and obtain the characteristic handles (getCharacteristic()). We use the "read" characteristic's client configuration descriptor to enable notifications from the RFDuino server to the Android client so that we get a callback when the RFDuino side sends something to us.
Disconnection is worth detailing because there's an RFDuino speciality here. Normally, one can just disconnect from the service with the disconnect() method invocation. RFDuino however is left in a limbo state in this case: the BLE session is disconnected but the RFDuino application does not receive a callback and cannot accept a new connection request. The "disconnect" characteristic has to be written to (the value does not matter) for the RFDuino server to properly disconnect.
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