Life Outside PLT1

From idea to failure

January 3, 2009 on 10:36 pm | In Uncategorized | | Jeremy Read

During the party I went to at New Year’s I realised that TVs are now large enough, that a lot of people can sit around them and that just about everyone now has a cellphone. So why restrict yourself to only having a maximum of 4 players for a game? If you could use a cellphone as a controller via Bluetooth, then you could have many players playing the same game, perhaps playing virtual cricket.

Figure 1. Crude drawing of people sitting around a TV playing cricket.

This seemed like a cool little project to work on. Since the bluetooth protocol has named devices, you could automatically have your name appear in game. Also FPGAs are cheap now, so combined with some basic bluetooth hardware it would be possible to build your own console system, though for now I was going to use my laptop as a testbed.

The first task was working out how to connect a bluetooth device (in this case my cellphone) to my computer via code. My language of choice is C# as it’s the language I’ve worked with it for about 4 years now and tends to have better library support on the Windows platform.

After a couple of minutes hunting around I discovered that there was a bluetooth library in the Coding4Fun samples. From there it was a breeze to programmatically find my cellphone and connect it and prod it, and it’s at this point I realised I had a problem. I can’t fetch arbitary input from it, hence I can’t use cellphones as input devices.

Which kind of throws a spanner in the works. Now I could target specific phones from this point on, and write an app that sends the information I want via Bluetooth, but currently this idea is on hold as what I really want is a nice general solution for all cellphones.