Writing Serial Data (via Bluetooth)

joshmiller

Okay I'm stumped. I'm trying to control an I-racer car (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11162) over bluetooth via Processing. So I thought the best starting point would be to make sure I can send bluetooth commands from my mac, so I paired the car with my mac, used z-term (http://www.dalverson.com/zterm/) to connect to the bluetooth "port", and send the hex codes that control the car. It worked. Then I thought I should be able to do the same thing with the Serial library in Processing. And kind of I can, but only once. If I unpair the car, then repair it in system prefs, and start my Processing app it can send exactly 1 command to the car, and it works. But then it won't send anything else. I quit the application (I've tried it with and without closing the serial port), start it again and I cannot send commands again. Unless I start z-term or unpair the device I can never send commands again (Z-term can always send unlimited amounts of commands).

Not sure where to go from here. Here's a stripped-down version of my code: import processing.serial.*;

Serial s;

void setup() {
  println(Serial.list()); 
  s=new Serial(this, Serial.list()[5], 38400);
  println("OPENING PORT");
}

void draw() {
}

void keyPressed() {
  if (key=='a') {
    println("sending 0x6f");
    s.write(0x6f);
  }

  if (key=='b') {
    println("sending 0x2f");
    s.write(0x6f);
   }

   if (key=='q') {
    s.clear();
    s.stop();

    println("CLOSING PORT");
   }  
}

Only works once. Thoughts? Thanks!

joshmiller

By the way, on OS X 10.9

daveball

Did you get this working? If not might i suggest that check key i think should be inside the draw function as this is the function that get automatically looped. If this does resolve your issue can you let me know.