A recent discussion on the LEGO Community forum about the WeDo kit led to an interesting question. ‘Could you run a simple robot, with off board (on tablet or PC) processing? ie. Could you let the computer to the all the tricky computation and just have the robot send sensor values and receive motor commands?’
It isn’t yet possible to even try with the WeDo set but I thought I’d give it a go with the EV3. Don’t get me wrong, this is not particularly useful, but I wanted to see if it possible given the probable lag time of the Bluetooth data transfer.
Short answer – Yes it’s possible, but you can’t go too fast otherwise the robot shoots over the top of the line before a bluetooth command has a chance to be received by the master, processed and sent back to the slave.
Video below of it in action. Screenshots of the program under that and full .ev3 file to download at the bottom if you want to give it a go yourself.
Could it be done better / more reliable? Undoubtedly! If you come up with a better way, test it out and let me know how you go!
;)
