Use the FRC Control System to drive a car with an iPhone

[Eugene Fang]

Originally Posted by AustinSchuh

I wrote an app to drive 971's robot. I reverse engineered the driver station protocol and wrote an iphone app to drive. I'd say joysticks work a lot better. I steered by using the ipod like a steering wheel, and had an onscreen throttle and ball manipulation buttons. I found that I ended up just pegging the throttle full forwards, and then steering, which didn't work all that well when playing another robot in a practice match.

To do it, you need to either jailbreak your iphone/ipod, or pay for the $99 developer fee for 1 year worth of licensing, mess with all the encryption, and use a mac. I wrote an app for work over the summer, so I already had access to a developer key and a fair amount of knowledge on how to do the graphics.

I'm really bad at remembering this kind of thing, but I'll see if I can get a video up online.

I wouldn't be surprised that the joysticks work much better. I'm thinking of doing this more for a wow/cool factor, rather than functionality.

Thanks a lot for the info though. I'm looking forward to seeing that video Sounds cool.