There’s not much that the HTC Hero can’t do and now you can strike ‘controlling robots’ off that list too! The guys over at ENEA in Sweden use a customized Android application on the HTC Hero that controls a Mindstorms robot using Bluetooth and the tilt sensor in the phone.
For those wondering if this was tricky given the Hero’s limited Bluetooth support (as we’re still on Android 1.5 – hurry up HTC!), the answer would be yes. They instead had to use the Wi-Fi abilities of the phone to send the information to a laptop with Ubuntu Linux with a TCP/IP to Bluetooth tunnel. Once we (eventually) get Android 2.1 then this convoluted step can be skipped as we’ll get full Bluetooth support. Until that hallowed day comes, you can check out the video after the break.
Via Gizmodo.
