Hello all,
A project I’ve been fiddling with since the summer is getting remote control of a model tank from my computer.
I’ve got a jpeg camera able to send a stream of images through a dspic, but haven’t implemented a wireless link yet.
I was originally going for one of the nrf24 products, but decided that I’d rather use simple serial piping than write my own communications parts.
I’ve been eyeing the BlueSmirf product since it seems to offer some pretty painless serial communication to a remote micro, but I have some questions about the specs as given:
First, Range - The BlueSmirf page states a range of 100m in line of site, and the manual mentions 50ft indoors. Fair enough, but I would like to know which antenna this was measured with. On a related topic the Bluetooth dongle currently lists 20m as it’s range… is this indoor or is this line of sight? If it’s line of sight, then would using this device limit the communications range of the 100m remote unit artificially down to 20m?
Second, Data rate - The BlueSmirf page proudly proclaims “Any serial stream from 9600 to 115200bps can be passed seamlessly from your computer to your target”, yet in the manual the data rates are listed as 60kbps in normal mode and 200kbps in fast mode. Are these data rates EACH direction, or uplink+downlink?
If this is each direction, it’s great since it might let me communicate faster than 115200.
Sorry for the long post, I just want to look before I jump.
-Cannibal