Android/Arduino remote controlled car (Educational Project)

At Hogeschool Arnhem Nijmegen (HAN), department ICT, we teach first year students the basics of Embedded Systems using Arduino hardware and software. After six weeks (20 hours weekly), students are given an assignment to show their skills. We created an assignment for excellent students which is also used as a demo. The assignment is to control a remote controlled car from an Android phone.

The car used is a cheap one you can buy at several toyshops.

car

The remote control was modified so that it can be controlled from the digital pins from the Arduino.

Students are also given an Android Apk file which connects to a http-server (freely configurable) and sends the motions made by the phone. From there, it is up to the students to create an architecture to control the car from an Android phone.

For demo purposes we created the full solution where a laptop can be used to be an intermediate router to serve the WIFI connection and to interface to the Arduino controlled Remote Control.

Techniques Used

  • Arduino Software development in C/C++ dialect
  • Processing IDE used for webserver and serial communication with Arduino
  • Eclipse and Arduino SDK used to setup the APK. Written in Java with httpclient extentions.
  • The APK can be found here: Lamborghini.apk.