Teeth, Blue

While waiting for some outstanding camera components I decided to push ahead on another front: communication. I'm intending to interface with the S1 via mobile phone, leveraging it's fast processor for image processing. After some searching I decided to go with the HC-05 Bluetooth tranceiver, a cheap and available break-out board.

At first the pinout looked to require six wires, however after some experimenting only three will be required: VCC, GND & TX. The main hurdle for the sensor will be throughput, with 8 lines of image data needing to be sent over the wire. There are projects that have pushed the MCU as far as 2Mbit/s, which is close to the rates I'll need to support stereo image sensors at high resolution.

The next step will be a minimal mobile application to display the transmitted data, a simple test pattern at first. Qt should come in handy here, allowing a single app that will serve as the hub for many sensors. Onward and upward!

Arduino & Qt Creator

I've been re-working the Qt Creator project wizard of late, adding support for the Arduino core library. It's great to be working in a more capable IDE. For Serial Port monitoring there are many alternatives; I've found Ultra Serial Port Monitor to work well:

http://download.cnet.com/Ultra-Serial-Port-Monitor/3000-2094_4-10969502.html

The updated wizard can be found here:

https://bitbucket.org/engine_develop/arduino_wizard

Arduino & QT Creator

I've been playing with Arduino for some time now, and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. That said, there has been one aspect of development that has left me wanting more: the IDE. Although the official IDE offers a great way to get your feet wet, it lacks some features of more robust IDEs.

My favourite IDE by far is QT Creator:

http://qt-project.org/wiki/Category:Tools::QtCreator

I've created a QT Creator project wizard for Arduino that deals with the setup of ports, compiler flags and upload options. The wizard is available here; please follow the instructions in the 'install.txt' file to get up and running with Arduino in QT Creator:

https://bitbucket.org/engine_develop/arduino_wizard/src

Enjoy :)