Mohammadreza Sharifi has taken Raspberry Pi Pico-powered robots to a whole new level with his latest robotic project. Using the accelerometer in a smartphone, he is able to control the direction his robot drives by tilting the phone.
It’s cool enough to see another Pico-powered robot but what excites us here is how he managed to interface with the Pico using a smartphone. To pull this off, he had to develop a custom app to send the accelerometer data to the Pico in real-time.
According to Sharifi, the app was developed for use on Android devices using the MIT App Inventor platform. In the demonstration, the application is seen running on Sharifi’s phone which communicates with the Pico using Bluetooth. Changing the direction in which the phone is tilted will move the robot in that direction.
The project is open source for anyone curious about how it works or for those who may want to recreate it. Sharifi has made the code available at GitHub. You can also explore the original thread shared to Reddit by Sharifi for more details.
