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Post by jday6809 on May 7, 2024 10:28:37 GMT -5
Hey all,
Anyone have experience or thoughts regarding the possibility of controlling a pcb-mounted bluetooth transmitter with a Vectrex?
Was using a selfie-stick recently, and considered how pressing a button on the bluetooth remote can automatically take a photo on my phone. Wondered about the possibility of putting a small remote bluetooth transmitter on my homebrew game cart pcb that could be triggered by the vectrex to simply transmit out a single integer value that could be read by a bluetooth connected phone.
Has anyone tried this type of setup...hoping to implement an optional bluetooth feature in a upcoming homebrew....
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Post by gtoal on May 12, 2024 14:03:43 GMT -5
You need to research BT support chips and find out what they can do and how you interface to them. If you're doing everything under the control of the 6809 then you may find it difficult talking to chips that interface through SPI or I2C and you might have timing issues with chips that are interfaced as memory addresses. I have a suspicion that your best approach would be to add a complete MCU (eg Pico or a Bluefruit Feather or one of many STM32 variants) where BT was built in, which you could talk to any way you want over its GPIO pins. Something that looked like a serial port might be easiest. Having the MCU processor on the board would also allow for a lot more functionality that sending a single integer.
But since the receiver is going to be your cell phone, maybe Wifi is a better choice than BT which is hard to code for. There are *many* cheap & small MCUs with wifi that you could use, ESP8266, ESP32 etc. The more work you can offload to an MCU the better. *Or* use a Pitrex rather than a custom eprom board which ought to have enough built-in for you to use. You'll need to tweak the 6809 emulator to add some extracodes to allow 6809 code to communicate with the C code on the ARM. I favour using a SWI for that in order to keep the interface clean.
G
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Post by playvectrex on May 22, 2024 17:37:11 GMT -5
Hey all, Anyone have experience or thoughts regarding the possibility of controlling a pcb-mounted bluetooth transmitter with a Vectrex? Was using a selfie-stick recently, and considered how pressing a button on the bluetooth remote can automatically take a photo on my phone. Wondered about the possibility of putting a small remote bluetooth transmitter on my homebrew game cart pcb that could be triggered by the vectrex to simply transmit out a single integer value that could be read by a bluetooth connected phone. Has anyone tried this type of setup...hoping to implement an optional bluetooth feature in a upcoming homebrew.... Hi Jon! I've done a few things in this area. It's fairly easy to send a single ASCII digit out of the PB6 line, and read that with a hardware USART input on any microcontroller. It would be trivial to forward this character somewhere else over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Another way you could connect a phone, and not have to design an app for whatever you are thinking of... is to run a Web Server on the Wi-Fi chip inside the cartridge. Then send your characters/digits/commands to that... and the phone can easily connect to a Wi-Fi chip in AP mode, open a browser and connect to 192.168.1.2 and boom... your server renders a web app on a browser that you can interact with. You can make it display things, or take input... however getting data back to the Vectrex would be more complicated but possible in the same way data can be read back from a 1-wire memory device (e.g. DS2431+) for high score saves. |
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Post by jday6809 on Jun 1, 2024 22:07:32 GMT -5
Hey all, Anyone have experience or thoughts regarding the possibility of controlling a pcb-mounted bluetooth transmitter with a Vectrex? Was using a selfie-stick recently, and considered how pressing a button on the bluetooth remote can automatically take a photo on my phone. Wondered about the possibility of putting a small remote bluetooth transmitter on my homebrew game cart pcb that could be triggered by the vectrex to simply transmit out a single integer value that could be read by a bluetooth connected phone. Has anyone tried this type of setup...hoping to implement an optional bluetooth feature in a upcoming homebrew.... Hi Jon! I've done a few things in this area. It's fairly easy to send a single ASCII digit out of the PB6 line, and read that with a hardware USART input on any microcontroller. It would be trivial to forward this character somewhere else over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Another way you could connect a phone, and not have to design an app for whatever you are thinking of... is to run a Web Server on the Wi-Fi chip inside the cartridge. Then send your characters/digits/commands to that... and the phone can easily connect to a Wi-Fi chip in AP mode, open a browser and connect to 192.168.1.2 and boom... your server renders a web app on a browser that you can interact with. You can make it display things, or take input... however getting data back to the Vectrex would be more complicated but possible in the same way data can be read back from a 1-wire memory device (e.g. DS2431+) for high score saves. |
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Post by playvectrex on Jun 2, 2024 20:29:35 GMT -5
Hey Jon!
Saw your reply on YouTube, but it looks like you meant to reply above and did not actually? Let me know if you need more info.
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