Hacks from the kitchen

Controlling your Mindstorms NXT robot with bluetooth on Windows

I just got my Mindstorms robot and obviously had to start working on controlling the robot remotely. This is just some notes and a "hole in the wall" test.

Setting up bluetooth devices sucks - "setting up" anything does - but here's the mnemonic route for a sequence of actions that work.

• Turn on the NXT bluetooth radio and make it discoverable
  
• Add a bluetooth device (Win XP SP2 required, control panel, bluetooth settings)
  
• Enter a passkey on windows
  
• Wait for the passkey popup on the NXT and enter the same passkey there
  
• Wait for much too long
  

Note: I found the connection setup brittle if I also used bluetooth from the program editor.

I used the perl scripts here (These ruby scripts might work for you).

Use the configuration program to update the serial port configuration for your system. COM7, the default setting, should work unless you have a ton of devices. Look for the "outgoing" Com port for the NXT.
wrt to the perl scripts above, add the line
$data = "\x00\x09\x00\x02a\x00";
to send a single letter 'a' to the NXT mailbox no 1 (zero based here, third byte is mailbox). Reading messages from a mailbox is how the visual programming environment can interact with the mindstorms robot.
I had limited success with the preset commands included in the perl script. Of all the commands in the Bluetooth SDK I only got the "PLAYTONE" direct command to work and then the more important one, which is the messagewrite above.
Note: Speed is not a feature of this communication channel.

I wrote a simple program to test: It checks the BT mailbox for a string 'a' - if it finds one it takes a quick roll back and forth. It's worth mentioning that you can't send messages to a mailbox unless a program is running - it's not enough that the NXT is turned on.

I then added a CGI wrapper around the perl script, exposed it temporarily on this webserver and had a world controllable robot. Next project: Sensor output back on the web.

Visual programming environment alert: The Labview derived visual programming environment seems buggy to me. I had to do 2 tries in generating a test program, because the first program just wasn't picking up the scanner input. I tested with the ultrasonic sensor that it wasn't buggy Bluetooth. I then reassembled the exact same program - and that worked. I got a clue when I shut down the editor and got an error message that my program had an "insane object " something or other. Very kid-friendly, that.

My test robot is here (286kb). (dig that filezise btw, that's completely insane for what the program does).

Posted by Claus at August 17, 2006 1:50 AM