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Subject: 
Re: BT in robotics
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Fri, 3 Jun 2005 16:11:16 GMT
Original-From: 
Bruce Boyes <bboyes@systronix.com&nospam&>
Viewed: 
1153 times
  
At 09:03 AM 6/3/2005, Bruce Hopkins wrote:
2. How else (other than Bluetooth) could you send data from your
cellphone to your robot? IR isn't an ideal solution, since a lot of
phones don't support it.

Use the data capability of the phone to set up their equivalent of an IP
connection.

On my TMobile phone this is painfully slow, under 100 kbits at best, often
less than 50 kbits, even when literally next door to a cell. I did some
tests with a borrowed PCMCIA data modem at a TMobile sales shop, and that
convinced me not to buy it. Plus the charge per kbyte is still outrageous.

3. I created the JB-22 kit, so yes I use it. I use it alot.  It's a
very cheap kit that allows anybody to get started with Bluetooth
development.

4. When I get a chance, I'll try to do some real tests for you
regarding pure data tx times. The 2-3 second time frame that I gave
you is the time it takes for my java class to startup, get the cached
connection parameters, create the connection, create a session (which
is optional), read a file from the hard drive, send the data, close
the connection and session, and return. In 2-3 seconds, in my opinion,
that's pretty impressive. And of course, I used the JB-22 kit for all
this.

So where I have always hit a brick wall is getting some pluggable BT module
with a SPI or serial interface to add to an embedded system. Just like
we've done with Maxstream and Linx RF modems. These don't seem to exist for
BT and I cannot understand why. These need to be under $100 each to be
practical.

The Maxstream modems we use do 38 kbits with an actual range of a city
block (1/8 mile) in our downtown office. They are under $100. Others have
range of 1 km or better for under $200. And you can really buy them and
they are easy to use.

5. Bluetooth does has a 7-node limit for piconets. However, you can
overcome this limitation by chaining your piconets together, which is
called a scatternet.

So does each piconet have a different channel then? How would this work in
a swarm of 20 robots for example, all on the same stage or in the same lab?

6. Bluetooth has lot's advantages (trust me, I can go on and on) for
instance, you can run TCP/IP over the Bluetooth protocol. Let that
sink in for a second. That means that you can have all your wireless
Bluetooth devices communicate to each other with an IP address, and
you'll have the full TCP/IP stack to play with. Your networked
application doesn't even have to know that all the nodes are wireless
and doesn't have to care about communicating to the nodes using the
Bluetooth semantics.

We'd like to run JXTA on top of everything as the "nuetralizing" app layer.
It runs on any wireless platform and any wired TCP/IP platform.

I'm also a Java fanatic, and Psinaptic makes a Jini implementation for
the CSR BlueCore2 Bluetooth chips. That means that you can have your
Bluetooth devices form a Bluetooth network, and then overlay it with a
Jini network. Very, very cool.

http://www.psinaptic.com/blue_core.jsp

Yes I know the folks at Psinaptic through our work with Dallas TINI, and
JavaOne over the years.

Will you be at JavaOne? I'm there all week and giving TS-1464 on Thu.

7. Yes, we definitely need to collaborate, because I can see some
really cool applications coming on the Bluetooth side of things.


OK then 2 questions

1) have you looked at running JXTA on top of your dev kits? Then you have
seamless integration with JXTA on wired and other wireless node. Any JXTA
node can discover and use services from any other node. It's designed to
scale into the billions of nodes. So robots all over the planet could
communicate and share data and services with any other JXTA nodes which
could be PCs, PDAs or cell phones.

2) could your dev kit be adapted to a non-USB interface for embedded system
use? Or is there another BT module which could be used? So far everyone
I've seen and tried to buy is a dead end: either a $gazillion license
needed, $5000 dev kit needed, etc. It's been very disheartening.

(On the other hand several under-$500 Zigbee kits are available today - we
have the Freescale one, as are many other good RF modem dev kits such as
Maxstream). Why do BY vendors make this so hard? Maybe you know the reason
for such high barriers to entry. Is there any hope for this changing?

Regards

Bruce



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: BT in robotics
 
Bruce, 1. TMobile does have a flat rate for data at $19 /mo 2. Is there really interest anymore in RS-232 Bluetooth modules? I used to have a conact at BlueUnplugged.com and he was almost willing to give them away, because they weren't selling. 3. (...) (19 years ago, 5-Jun-05, to lugnet.robotics)
  Re: BT in robotics
 
(...) That's happened since we got our office contract. I'll check into it, thanks. If it's $19 for as much as you can stand to use, that's not so bad. We were paying $10-$20 for a couple of megabytes per month. But the phones are so slow I don't (...) (19 years ago, 5-Jun-05, to lugnet.robotics)

Message is in Reply To:
  BT in robotics
 
(...) I'd love to have my cell phone give me status and feedback from my robots. BT isn't the only way to do this, of course, and using the cellular data capability of the phone would allow connecting from around the world, not just within 10 (...) (19 years ago, 3-Jun-05, to lugnet.robotics)

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