I've looked around but failed to find any good (read: simple) answer to this.
I have a scooter that someone tried to steal a while ago. The ignition is broken, and instead of buying a new mechanical one with a key (would cost me like 40% of the scooter´s current value…) I thought that I would make something more interesting. Here's the plan.
I would like to send all the sensory input from the scooter (lights indicator, fuel indicator and so on) to an iPhone app that I'll develop. My idea at the moment is to hook all sensors up to an Arduino board, connect this to my iPhone using USB, and then display the data in the app – thus creating a digital dashboard kind of solution. To make things even more complicated I would also like to connect an electromagnetic switch to the Arduino board, and to control this from my iPhone. The idea here is to only be able to start the scooter if I've "unlocked" the circuits (actually it's like removing a shortcut solution used in scooters to stop the ignition) from with my iPhone app. Anyway, this means that I need to be able to send some kind of signal from my iPhone app, via USB, to the Arduino board.
Any help with how to get started with this project is more than highly appreciated. Many thanks in advance!
My idea at the moment is to hook all sensors up to an Arduino board
First step is to define what "all sensors" means.
connect this to my iPhone using USB
The Arduino is a USB slave. The iPhone is most likely a USB slave, too. Two slaves can't talk to each other. You'll need a USB Host shield.
So, an iPhone, an Arduino, an electromagnetic switch, a USB Host shield, the SDK key from Apple so you can develop an iPhone application, and hours and hours spent coding and debugging is cheaper than a proper repair on a cheap scooter.
My advice - save your money and get a better scooter.
You can also transfer data between the arduino and the iphone using the mic/earphones jack. but assume it will be difficult to decode the data that send to the iphone using the mic input.
PaulS: Thanks for your reply. My only experience from using Arduino is from having connected it to my Mac using USB and then to read the sensor data from the Arduino board. I used the Adobe Flash APIs and thus made the application in Flash. This was a pretty straightforward approach (got it to work in half a day), and I was kind of hoping to something similar for the iPhone. Of course I'll have to develop the iPhone app in the proper SDK (oh dear...), but is the setup even possible to imagine? From your reply I'm not sure
The sensors that I'm thinking about might actually not be sensors as such, but more signals (voltage) from already existing electronics. My idea is to take the circuits that leads to the current indicator lights, make sure that they are not too powerful, and then connect them to arduino and just read their values. Perhaps a fantasy?
Regarding the hard work: That's the fun part you know This way I'll learn a lot, and make a very custom made solution at the same time.
My idea is to take the circuits that leads to the current indicator lights, make sure that they are not too powerful, and then connect them to arduino and just read their values. Perhaps a fantasy?
This is the easy part. Just make sure the voltage seen by the Arduino is not more than 5V.
Regarding the hard work: That's the fun part you know This way I'll learn a lot, and make a very custom made solution at the same time.
