Hello everyone, I hope I'm in the good sub-forum ^^
We're 3 students working on a project at school which is about creating a daftpunk helmet with LEDs display using adafruit LED strip. We also want to control the LED display with bluetooth communications between an Android phone (with an app that we will create) and the microcontroller that we will put in the Helmet.
Here are some photos so you can have an idea about the progress:
This is the arduino Uno and the bluetooth shield.
Here is the battery that we will use.
This is a first view of the headband we're actually welding.
So, for the moment the LEDs are working as we want them to work, now we're stuck on the bluetooth.
What we want is to control the LEDs messages through an app on an Android phone thanks to the bluetooth shield.
The problem is, even after some researches, we do not have any idea about how we can make this work.
Could anyone guide us on how we could make a program on arduino to connect a phone with the bluetooth shield, please ?
Our first idea was to simply transfer the code that define the LED messages through the phone-bluetoothshield communication that will televerse it to the arduino Uno, but we don't really know if it is possible.
All help are welcome, if you need more information please ask me. =)
Personally I would start at the beginning with your bluetooth comms. Do you have a bluetooth adapter for PC? Perhaps a bluetooth enabled laptop?
With that I would then:
First : build a simple hello world arduino program - connect bluetooth to pc and print "hello"
Second: Two way communications - Send a message from the pc to the arduino and get a response
Third : Build a control system - Do you want to send packets, strings? i.e. Pc Sends "On 3" and all the LEDs blink 3 times
Once you have mastered these 3 steps, then you can consider android, and how to make your leds do cool patterns. - look at data packet methods. What happens if the bluetooth data is noisey or drops out? Could "On 3" become "On" How would you catch this on the arduino?
Start small, build up to your grand goal. I like the project,
I think you will find this instructables useful: Link
Also, if you have trouble with not having your hardware in one place, there are obvious things you can work on without the bluetooth seperately.
Most importantly, what will be sent over the bluetooth? You can use the serial connection of the pc (Serial Monitor) to send data to the Arduino. In this way you can mimick the bluetooth connection and have the arduino react to your instructions.
Once you have the bluetooth modules connected, it should be trivial to send commands because you've already established your control scheme.