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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."

8 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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
    3. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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?

  4. 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.

  5. 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.