When we first saw [Jeffrey Nelson]’s G1 based robot we immediately wondered what the transport for the controls was. The G1‘s hardware supports USB On-The-Go, but it’s not implemented in Android yet. It turns out he’s actually sending commands by using DTMF tones through the headphone adapter. The audio jack is connected to a DTMF decoder that sends signals to the bot’s Arduino. He wrote client/server code in Java to issue commands to the robot. You can find that code plus a simple schematic on his site. A video of the bot is embedded below.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PddThiIbGz4]
[via Engadget]
Hah, good ol DTMF. I used to get free payphone calls with the coin tones on my ipod.
-Taylor
omg! i love it. crummy looking robots made of silly stuff are cuter than puppies! good work man.
wow taylor you must be living in 1980 or somewhere other than the states – haven’t been able to play dtmf tones into a phone for free calls in a long time…I would have guessed the ipod was invented after dtmf tone playback stopped working.
nice hack – cool that jeff’s made such a simple toy with not much more than an arduino, his phone and his plasticware. :P
Kinda reminds me of the Wimobot, the robots running Windows Mobile.
http://www.wimobot.com
supershwa: yea, i tried it once– didn’t work. then read up on it and found that the technique had been dead for a long time.
Now I knew why Matt Cutts adores it. Nice :)
occasionally in some rural areas you can still find some of the _old_ pay phones in use. they are getting way further and way fewer between though. As the rural telcos update their networks, the old phones will no longer work and will need to be replaced.
This guy’s head is a toilet float. His body may or may not be mostly Jenga blocks. Overall, a fun little project.
nice post, thx.
Regard,
Abu
cool man!!!nice
OK man you can now send it on moon :-)
The NASA director
^^