Making Android Accessories with IOIO

Chapter 5. Surveillance Rover

The last project of this book is to create a small IOIO-powered rover. This is another project that uses a Bluetooth to give wireless control of the rover (Figure 5-1 and Figure 5-2).

Figure 5-1. Surveillance rover

Figure 5-2. Surveillance rover control software

The rover also optionally provides a platform for a wireless web cam or a second Android phone with wireless web cam software on it, as shown in Figure 5-1. The author used an app called IP Camera from the Android Market, which converts the phone into a web cam that acts as a server over WiFi. You can then go to a URL in your browser and see the image from the web cam.

The Design

The outputs of an IOIO board are not powerful enough to drive electric motors, so a motor control breakout board is used. This little board (Figure 5-3) allows bi-directional control of the motors. That is, you can control both the speed and direction of two separate motors.

Figure 5-3. SparkFun motor controller

Figure 5-4 shows the schematic diagram for the project. This time, for obvious reasons, we will use batteries rather than a power adaptor.

The IOIO pins for the motor control are selected so that we can use header pins to ...