keyboard controlling arduino rc car with UDP packets (VB 2008)
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Hi, this is my first post on these forums. Hope this is in the right place. Doing a college project where we control an rc car wired into an Arduino over the network from a computer. It's been brilliant doing this project and all the stuff I've learned from the electronics to the coding, and I've gotten pretty well as far as I thought I could with a lot of help from this forum and many others, so thanks for that. Decided to do the coding in VB 2008 cos of how quick and easy it was to get things running with VB in first year, but there was no constraint on language choice, and if anyone thinks another language is better suited to this I'd love to hear thoughts on that too. Anyway, having not used VB in a couple of years this forum and a few others were invaluable for rooting out which methods and things I needed to put this together, couldn't have even gotten started without it. But I wanted to postpone posting for as long as possible and get as much done on my own as I could first, which I think I have. I have a solution pretty much working, and I wanted to get more expert opinions on how it could be improved or implemented better (even if it should be scrapped and a different approach taken, I'm sure it's far from perfect). Here's the skiinny: VB app checks for held keys with GetAsyncKeyState, and various combos (of arrow keys) cause particular character to be sent in UDP packet to Arduino, which does it's thing based on the character in the packet. The held keys was chosen as the most intuitive method of controlling an rc car from the pc, and I'm using a timer's tick to run the GetAsyncKeyState, and what I suspect might be a somewhat convoluted system of variable comparisons to prevent a packet from being sent until the state of the held keys changes. UDP was chosen for speed, though I'm really not sure what difference it would make in the real world if trying to control the rc over the internet say with live keyboard control, and whether it would be viable with UDP and not an alternative, or whether it wouldn't make a practical difference, or whether it wouldn't be viable at all! Anyway, the thing is working, and sending packets only on initial press or release of key(s). The one glitch I've so far detected is that when releasing all the keys, which should send the "z" character and stop the car, the same character that was previously sent is re-sent, rather than the 'stop' character "z". So here's the code, VB 2008:
Imports System.Text
Imports System.Net
Impo -
Hi, this is my first post on these forums. Hope this is in the right place. Doing a college project where we control an rc car wired into an Arduino over the network from a computer. It's been brilliant doing this project and all the stuff I've learned from the electronics to the coding, and I've gotten pretty well as far as I thought I could with a lot of help from this forum and many others, so thanks for that. Decided to do the coding in VB 2008 cos of how quick and easy it was to get things running with VB in first year, but there was no constraint on language choice, and if anyone thinks another language is better suited to this I'd love to hear thoughts on that too. Anyway, having not used VB in a couple of years this forum and a few others were invaluable for rooting out which methods and things I needed to put this together, couldn't have even gotten started without it. But I wanted to postpone posting for as long as possible and get as much done on my own as I could first, which I think I have. I have a solution pretty much working, and I wanted to get more expert opinions on how it could be improved or implemented better (even if it should be scrapped and a different approach taken, I'm sure it's far from perfect). Here's the skiinny: VB app checks for held keys with GetAsyncKeyState, and various combos (of arrow keys) cause particular character to be sent in UDP packet to Arduino, which does it's thing based on the character in the packet. The held keys was chosen as the most intuitive method of controlling an rc car from the pc, and I'm using a timer's tick to run the GetAsyncKeyState, and what I suspect might be a somewhat convoluted system of variable comparisons to prevent a packet from being sent until the state of the held keys changes. UDP was chosen for speed, though I'm really not sure what difference it would make in the real world if trying to control the rc over the internet say with live keyboard control, and whether it would be viable with UDP and not an alternative, or whether it wouldn't make a practical difference, or whether it wouldn't be viable at all! Anyway, the thing is working, and sending packets only on initial press or release of key(s). The one glitch I've so far detected is that when releasing all the keys, which should send the "z" character and stop the car, the same character that was previously sent is re-sent, rather than the 'stop' character "z". So here's the code, VB 2008:
Imports System.Text
Imports System.Net
ImpoHey there, Interesting project you have here :) Must be a lot of fun to work on. I see this post was from a week back, so likely you have already figured this out for yourself, but for what it's worth I'll reply. I added a few remarks/comments to your code; I'm not going to nitpick on the finer details, as most of the code looks good! I did notice that you are using the Select Case in an odd way and it's probably best to just make an If-Then-ElseIf statement of it.
Jose Sallamanca wrote:
Anyway, the thing is working, and sending packets only on initial press or release of key(s). The one glitch I've so far detected is that when releasing all the keys, which should send the "z" character and stop the car, the same character that was previously sent is re-sent, rather than the 'stop' character "z".
So here's the code, VB 2008:Private Sub Tmr_Tick(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Tmr.Tick
Tmr.Stop()
' You don't need to stop the timer and then restart it. Just let it continue running (or did you find a specific need to restart it?)
If Not controlChoice = controlChoicePrev Then
'UDP_______________________________________________________' I see here that you are constantly (every timer tick!) rebinding the udpClient to the target. Luckily, it's UDP so this is not disastrous, but it is
' a bit unnecessary. It's probably a better idea to relocate the GLOIP = .. GLOINTPORT = .. udpClient.Connect(..) to your Form1_Load event handler.
' Also, see my comment 1) at the end for a cautionary tip, which applies when you are running a 32 bits program under 64 bits windows.' === BLOCK 1 ===
Try
' ------- START of the MOVE (when moved, enclose both in Try-Catch and handle the errors appropriately) -------
GLOIP = IPAddress.Parse("192.168.1.177")
GLOINTPORT = 8888
udpClient.Connect(GLOIP, GLOINTPORT)
' ------- END of the MOVE -------
bytCommand = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(cc)
udpClient.Send(bytCommand, bytCommand.Length)
Catch ex As Exception
Console.WriteLine(ex.Message)
End Try
'UDP_______________________________________________________End If' === END BLOCK 1 ===
' === BLOCK 2 ===
If GetAsyncKeyState(Keys.Up) Or