Controlling a car using a smartphone and Micro:bit

Purpose of this tutorial:

In this tutorial, we will control a car using the Micro:bit card and a smartphone.

we create two programs: a mobile application with App Inventor for the smartphone and a makecode program for the Micro:bit card.

Necessary components

• Micro:bit
• Smartphone
• Car

For the assembly of the car you can see the following article: https://www.robotique.tech/robotics/development-of-a-remote-control-car-with-microbit/

Makecode program

Here is the makecode program which allows you to connect the Micro: bit card to the smartphone and to receive a message containing the command order of the car.

Creation of the application with App Inventor:

We are going to create a mobile application called ‘commander_voiture’ with App Inventor which allows you to control the car from the smartphone.

We propose to create the design of the application, with the following visual:

Programming with App Inventor

To program the application, App Inventor offers us to use the Blocks space, which allows you to create a program in the form of a block diagram. Very easy to use but requiring a little programming logic.

Here is the program of the application created in the Blocks area of ​​the Inventor App: