IPad-Controlled Video Blimp
breakfastny.comHi there, Wanted to see if this might be of interest to share with your readers.<p>To promote a silent auction for KidRobot Munny characters (Munny exhibit here: http://munnyexhibit.com/) created by the world’s leading industrial designers. Breakfast NY created a novel device that showcases developer experimentation at its finest by turning the iPad into a remote controller of a mini blimp equipped with a “blimp cam” that leverages the built-in accelerometer. Whenever the blimp’s camera hovered over a person, the iPad software transformed their faces into those of the Munny characters. The feed was displayed on a big screen for all to see.<p>The iPad app was built in 2-3 days by one person using Appcelerator’s Titanium 1.2 mobile SDK and relied heavily on the newly added TCPSocket. They mostly used basic UI components such as buttons and textfields. However, the TCPSocket API together with the accelerometer for basic right and left navigation is what makes the core functionality with the app. Breakfast NY communicated from the iPad app to the blimp via a laptop running a tcp-to-serial bridge and the laptop speaks to the blimp via an xbee chip (serial).<p>For the video, they used a webcontrol in which they are drawing the video (motion jpeg) using server push. They found that using this technique over quicktime stream had a considerable benefit in terms of lag (only 100-200 milliseconds).
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