Developing an Android App for EV3

At the Bricktastic event back in July I showed off my Plott3r as part of the Mindstorms exhibits. It was programmed to do the Hilbert and Dragon curves, several plot “files” and some other bits.

One of the questions that the kids kept asking was something along the lines of “can it write my name?” Unfortunately it wasn’t, and isn’t, capable of writing ad-hoc text. So since then I’ve been pondering ways of supplying user-provided text. I did consider an ultrasonic triangulated “keyboard”, but the US sensors got confused with each other’s signals – so for the moment I’ve put that idea to bed to be revisited in the future. My original thought, however, was “can I do this with a mobile phone?”

Since that original thought I’ve been looking at how to write an Android app that has a simple text box and “send” button. Kids are used to mobiles these days, so it seems to me to be the perfect UI. So far I seem to have settled on using MIT’s App Inventor 2. It does support EV3 to some extent, but I’m going to have to get down and dirty with the EV3 byte code to send mailbox messages via bluetooth 🙂

So, now I need to get learning how this AI2 system works. Thankfully they have tutorials, so I’ll be building the tilt/move tutorial soon to get to grips with communicating with the EV3. Tinkering with bytecode won’t be too daunting as I’m used to getting down to that level of bit twiddling via my current and previous jobs.

Nothing to show yet, but watch this space!

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