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Controlling a Robot From a Smartphone's Headphone Jack

Posted by timothy on from the hypnotic-control dept.

RedEaredSlider passes along this excerpt about what looks like a smart advance in controlling hobbyist robots:"The concept is quite simple: put a wheeled chassis on a smart phone or iPod Touch that allows for using the device as the 'brain.' But that simplicity is what makes the robot, called Romo, powerful. Since the controls are contained entirely within the phone, they can be downloaded as apps. One can add new physical capabilities to Romo -– a claw, or a scoop -– but that doesn't require any new additions to the phone. Also, the controls are through the headphone jack. That simplifies the design and means that the robot doesn't need to be linked with only one brand of smart phone."

24 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Audio jack to get a standard connector? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why not use micro-USB instead of the audio connector?

    1. Re:Audio jack to get a standard connector? by SuricouRaven · · Score: 3, Informative

      Because apps don't have access to the USB interface. At the very least you'd have to root/jailbreak the phone.

    2. Re:Audio jack to get a standard connector? by satuon · · Score: 2

      I own a Chinese-made mp3 player that connects to the computer through the stereo jack - it has a cable that has USB at one end and a stereo jack plug at the other. I could even use it like a USB memory stick with this cable. And it's charged through the stereo jack - the adapter ends with a stereo jack plug.

      I think the stereo jack is just used as a conductor to carry electric current, both for charging and to carry information. They're doing it as a cost-cutting measure, they save-up on 2 additional ports that way. So when I read about this article I wasn't really surprised.

    3. Re:Audio jack to get a standard connector? by Anonymus · · Score: 2

      I imagine it works almost exactly like a modem. Don't you remember accidentally picking up the telephone while using the internet during the 90s? :)

  2. Not new by ewanm89 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You mean like ham operators have been doing to control their SDR radio units for years?

    1. Re:Not new by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      It is innovative if you do it with an ipad2 or iphone4S.

    2. Re:Not new by icebraining · · Score: 2

      Or like any acoustically coupled modem.

      --
      Dilbert RSS feed
    3. Re:Not new by Lisias · · Score: 3, Informative

      1) Take any old but effective idea from the past
      2) Use it on a Apple device
      3) ...
      4) PROFIT!

      Serious, nice idea but far, far away from an advance or breakthrough.

      --
      Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
    4. Re:Not new by JoeMerchant · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The implied innovation (that keeps coming up in these "iPhone and other smartphone") is in dusting off old ideas that can be implemented with the "now ubiquitous" technology.

      Old ideas that require a kilometers long particle accelerator, or three mules and 45 feet of leather strapping aren't nearly as exciting as seeing something cool done with this cheap computer with a radio transmitter that you keep in a pocket next to your gonads.

      I once got kudos from Mr. Dean Kamen for employing a Handspring Visor to do medical datalogging. Yeah, medical datalogging had been done before, our company had been doing mostly that for the previous 25 years, and we didn't have anything to do with development of the Palm Pilot or the Visor, but we recognized the newly affordable, highly portable computers for their potential as a significant component of what was previously a much larger, more expensive, and less portable system. Sure, it could have been done 3 years earlier with "off the shelf" tech, but using the Visor dropped the development costs of the overall system by nearly an order of magnitude. I was a little embarrassed when he said it, but, looking back, we had the idea fairly far along in development as an accessory to interface to the serial port of a Palm Pilot before the Visor was announced, and when the Visor was announced, we backed up (maybe a month's work) to redo the device as an "on the bus" expansion board for the Visor instead. Our timing to take advantage of the Visor launch couldn't have been better - completely accidental, but that's how it worked out.

      For what it's worth, investment bankers took over the spinoff company that developed the idea, they got all queasy about depending on other companies and "non commodity technology" to support their investment so they went much more vertically integrated, building their own PDA, and recoding all the PC side software in Visual Studio and MFC (from Borland's OWL). In some senses, they were right, Borland and Palm/Handspring did die fairly soon thereafter, but in another view, their prescience about these problems is what hobbled their growth, taking almost a year to re-code the software, and longer to build their own PDA - if they had pushed harder on what they had in-hand, their time to market would have been dramatically reduced, and maybe they would have done better for the original investors. As it turned out, they just plodded along, slipping into chapter 11 about 10 years down the road.

    5. Re:Not new by JoeMerchant · · Score: 2

      But this isn't the first time it's been done with a smartphone. People were making little robots with Android G1 phones a while back using the headphone jack adapter. Is this somehow novel because it was done with an iPhone?

      Of course not, beyond the fact that the Android G1 wasn't as media friendly as the iPhone... Android G1, sounds like an obscure geek toy (even though it's not, really). iPhone, well, that's accessible, isn't it? Even my acquaintances in marketing have iPhones, and know how to install apps on them too.

      I feel the same way when people get excited about a project because "it's so accessible, it's on an Arduino."

  3. Re:Slow night? by Cryacin · · Score: 2

    I can just see all the old Commodore 64 nerds dusting off their old tape recorders and interfacing using audio tones.

    Sinclair from futurama might just be just around the corner.

    --
    Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
  4. Everything old is new again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The revenge of the modem. How long until someone shows off mad whistling skillz to control this robot?

    1. Re:Everything old is new again by Locutus · · Score: 2

      isn't it pathetic that after all these years of having handheld computers(Palm,WinCe, and Linux Zaurus) with I/O connectors being used for all sorts of things our "smart" phones have nothing standard but a audio jack.

      Besides reminding me of some of the Zaurus based robots around 10 years ago I'm also wondering why not use bluetooth between the phone and robot and wifi for CC(command and control)?

      here's one of the old Zaurus based bots:
      http://robotbox.net/project/dahlag/zaurbot

      LoB

      --
      "Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
  5. Fetch me my slippers! by YouDieAtTheEnd · · Score: 2

    Not sure why everyone is getting so excited about the controller interface being through the audio port since that is old hat and hardly the most interesting connotation of this idea. I'd be much more excited about the possibilities of having a ready built platform with camera, gps, wifi, bluetooth, speach recognition attached to physical actuators. If you were smart enough about the design of the app or provided enough of an interface so that you could program your own behaviors, this could be truly revolutionary for home robotics.

    1. Re:Fetch me my slippers! by JBMcB · · Score: 2

      It was a popular way to control toy robots in the 80's. I had an Omnibot that operated entirely on something resembling DTMF tones. The remote control just piped the tones over an AM channel. You could "program" the robot using it's on-board tape recorder, which just recorded the tones it received from the remote. One of the smaller 'brothers' of the Omnibot could be controlled by whistling different notes, or clapping. Same idea.

      --
      My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
  6. Re:Dumb by Relyx · · Score: 2

    Unfortunately it's not just cheap, trashy, poorly thought-out phones that have non-standard connectors. Even the iPhone and iPad have a non-standard port. Using the headphone socket is a very pragmatic solution which allows one to cover a very broad range of devices.

  7. Re:Dumb by icebraining · · Score: 2

    The Galaxy S II has OTG support, meaning it can act both as a host and as a slave, although apparently only a few devices (like mass storage drives with a FAT fs) seem to work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giJXF5pIITc

    --
    Dilbert RSS feed
  8. This could be useful by davidbrit2 · · Score: 2

    Siri, open the pod bay doors.

  9. Before you get too excited... by bradgoodman · · Score: 3, Informative
    Apple's developer agreement prohibits applications which execute any kind of interpreted, or downloaded code.

    So if you're envisioning an NTX-G style of robotics environment for the iPhone, you may need to think again.

    Even a simple "Big-Trak"-type (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak ) application would technically violate such terms. So - Android would clearly be the superior platform of this type of development.

    1. Re:Before you get too excited... by matthiasvegh · · Score: 2

      So - Android would clearly be the superior platform for development.

      FTFY

  10. Re:Slow night? by hedwards · · Score: 2

    I was wondering how this was different than when folks were sending information over a phone line via modem. Other than the obvious fact that they're using a sound jack rather than a modem.

  11. Smartphone = Universal Remote by Sentrion · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Expect to see more stories like these in the future. Before long, all of your old appliances that had displays and controls will now be nothing more than a box with a logo. All communication will be via blue tooth and wifi, and your smartphone or other compatible device will be the interface and display. The controller inside your appliance will probably be the same type of microprocessor used in your smartphone. Even classic "dumb" devices will soon have this capability, so you will be able to walk up to just about anything, hold your smartphone up to it, and see what it is, what it is doing, how it is doing it, and what changes you can make to it.

  12. Re:Why wired? by WrecklessSandwich · · Score: 2

    It would be better to control the robot via 802.11

    That requires an 802.11 network as well as 802.11 hardware on your robot, which costs significantly more than the onboard microcontroller.

  13. No need for an R2-D2 accessibility law now. by __aasehi2499 · · Score: 2

    I never thought I would see Star Wars tech come to reality, that thing always looked like a phone jack to me.