Bluetooth MSP430 Tank

Ever wanted to control a tank with your phone?  Well, here’s one way to make it happen.

Parts:

• MSP430 Launchpad with msp430g2553 chip.
• Wireless Bluetooth V2.0 RS232 TTL Tranceiver Module
• Motor Drive Booster Pack  You’ll need to make this yourself unless the guy (Parker Dillmann @ longhornengineer.com) who designed it starts selling them.  I used oshpark.com to print the board, and mouser.com to order the parts.
• A Tank with 2 motors.  You’re on your own here, but I bought my tank treads and motors at Pololu.com, and built the chassis out of scrap and legos.
• Some sort of battery (I used a 6.2V NiCd from another RC vehicle).
• And of course, an android phone.

Here’s the code for the launchpad:

main.c    The port connections are all described in the code.

You will also need uart.c from the longhornengineer.com site.

Here’s the APK for the little android app I wrote to control the thing:

MSP430Tank.apk

Here’s the code.  (As I mentioned it’s pretty rough, a cobbling together of various stuff from the internet and old projects I’ve written in the past.)

It’s just two sliders to control each motor and a menu item to connect to the bluetooth device.  It actually took some pretty tricky coding to the get the interface right, and I learned a lot about android bluetooth and multitouch programming in the process.  I can post the code if anybody is interested, but it is pretty rough (see above).

All in all, a fun project where I learned a lot as usual.  Next step might be to add some sensors.  Or maybe a really bright LED and then have a control on the phone to flash it at people.  Anyway, here’s a little video of the setup in action: