The goal of this project is to expand the RoboPhone application that was developed by Ofer Danino and Ashraf Kattoura. The RoboPhone app can access various smartphone sensors like camera, gyroscope, accelerometer sensor etc. In addition, the app has plenty of virtual sensors like Leds, Thumb Toggle etc.
The extension (our project) is to adding capability to the RoboPhone app in which it has a branch for writing a code in an object-oriented programming way (blocks). In this branch we can connect to an EV3 robot via Bluetooth (BT), and so we can access the robot’s sensors as well. For summary, the extension can access smartphone sensors, RoboPhone sensors & EV3 robot’s sensors. It also has the ability to route the command to its destination whether it’s internally (smartphone) or externally (robot) via BT.
For this purpose, we used an open source application designed by Google named Blocky. This app has graphical blocks and interprets each block to a Javascript command. It has built-in blocks such as loops or logic blocks. So, we extended this application by adding some new blocks for our RoboPhone application such as RoboPhone sensor blocks, EV3 robot sensor blocks, etc.
After writing a code using the OOP way in Blockly, we execute the JavaScript code generated by Blockly. The code’s output can be seen in a GUI designed in RoboPhone, or by commands directly to the robot such as moving forward or backward etc.