Awesome Bluetooth performance, range.

[regulatre]

I just wanted to share an experience I had with the Droid that made me love it 10 times more.

I was in the house writing code for an application I'm working on that uses Bluetooth to communicate with my vehicle. My car was parked outside and I was inside.

Well I connected to the debugger to view the log and found that my app (Voyager) had been running in the background on my Droid. This only happens when its connected via bluetooth.

So I go into my program and run a few requests against the vehicle computer. Sure enough, it's connected! the connection was clean and fast, just as if I was sitting in the drivers seat!

Between me and my vehicle was the steel car body, a brick wall, a couch, and my body. I was on the ground floor too. I didn't know Bluetooth had this type of range! Certainly my computer's bluetooth doesn't come anywhere close to this type of performance. I have to get within 15 feet of the car to connect to it with bluetooth.

So the short story is - the Bluetooth chip/antenna in the Droid ROCKS!!!!!

Hats off to the guys at Motorola with their choice of Bluetooth hardware.

 

[TheAndroidWorks]

That is great news! I have seen stable bluetooth connections work at well over 100 feet before, but it is rare.

This sounds like a very interesting application you are working on! Care to share more about it?

 

[regulatre]

That is great news! I have seen stable bluetooth connections work at well over 100 feet before, but it is rare.

This sounds like a very interesting application you are working on! Care to share more about it?

Sure, It's called Voyager. What it does is establishes a bluetooth connection to my car's ECU by way of bluetooth OBDii adapter. Through that connection is scans various metrics from my car, converts them, and stores them on the phone.

I'm working on wrapping it up into a service and presenting the data with a data provider. Then I'll write a UI (I wish someone else could help me with the UI) and then an adapter for OSDash.

I'm quite active right now on mp3car.com as I network with other folks with car-puters. OSDash is like a grand unification of carputer systems. In the case of Voyager, the Droid is the car-puter.

In the not too distant future I envision Voyager uploading the scan data to a web based OSDash module, storing it there, and presenting the data to the owner in snazzy graphs and report summaries.

Then a little further down the road I see Voyager tapping into the control systems bus (class-2 bus) and providing control over things like windows, OnStar, automatic start? Not sure what all is there, but we'll see.

Again, I'm on the lookout for android UI developer/s to help me code the UI (I suck at that kind of thing) once I get the service and data provider finished.

cheers,
reg

References:
Bluetooth OBDii adapter, made in USA
Bluetooth OBDii adapter, very cheap but reverse engineered by chineese
OBDII (On Board Diagnostics) described on Wikipedia
OSDash on mp3car.com
Voyager thread on mp3car.com
Class-2 data bus

 

[IOWA]

Yeah I was surprised one time with my moment as well! I left the phone in the car and I had my headset on and just got out to pay for gas without grabbing my phone. Well I heard a chime so i go to look at the phone, while im inside the gas station, and low and behold its still in my car windows closed doors shut through another door at least 200 ft away. Amazing. Imagine what BT3.0 will bring.