Hi. I willingly confess I know nothing about arduino and am a novice on c-code.
I have a theoretical project I'm thinking about doing and just want to know if arduino can make it happen and there is a point in me learning?
I have a show car that i'we been building on for a few years and I'm thinking it would be fun to have all input on android pads in the car. for an unobtainable "fantasy comparison", check out Tesla model S.
So i'm thinking speedometer, odometer, oil and all other pertinant stuff on a pad built in the dash instead of the original cluster.
So what i'm wondering is if one can take output from several arduino boards (preferably via usb to avoid connection issues) and use it as input on a pad.
Like, can I take arduino boards with different sensor inputs (one board for fuel gauge, one for speedometer and so on and so forth) and connect them to one mainboard and send everything via usb to a pad like a nexus 7?
I realize this would be a very big project and take alot of learning and time. I just want to know if it's possible? And if it's not, or not in the way that I listed, how would you do?
It's definitely doable, but if your first sentence is accurate it may be a bit steep for you. This would be a pretty big project even for an experienced user and seasoned programmer. You'll nee to be able to program the Arduino as well as the Android. The Arduino would take sensor readings or handle outputs and communicate to the pad over serial connection. The Android would have to be programmed to handle the input from and output to the Arduino and all the display stuff.
I do exactly what you are stating, in a different context, and with only two input sources. One is a board that contains an Arduino nano, and monitors six analog inputs. Those are sent via a hardware serial link to another arduino nano, on a different board, which is responsible for collecting three other analog inputs, and also for formatting all the analog output from both boards onto one display. The only tricky part, and that's not very tricky, is getting the communication timing across the serial link to function with no hiccups. For that, I send a digital HIGH signal to the non-display board to let it know when I want its data.
I agree with Delta_G, it is possible but not a job for a beginner. You need to learn how to read the sensors, interface the data to the tablet and then display data on the tablet. Any one of these is a going to take a lot of effort to learn.
If you are prepared to take some time over this project and go through the steps as @weedpharma has suggested you can learn, for example, to collect speedometer data as one small project and to collect oil data as another project. When you have all the little parts done you will know a great deal more and you will have all the working parts ready for aggregation into the total project.
It will also be much easier to get help here for a single part of the project rather than for a big mess of code.
Sending data to the tablet should be straightforward (another small project, on its own) but programming the Android tablet(s) is beyond the scope of this Forum. I don't know if this RemoteXY project works on a tablet - but it may be useful starting point.