I'm looking for some ideas or suggestions here.
We have an embedded system based around a small microcontroller (an AVR XMega, IIRC), connected to a PC using an FTDI chip and a USB cable, with a little PC program to control and monitor the embedded system. This all works fine.
The customer would like to know if they can use tablets (Android or iPad
- and maybe Android and iPad telephones too) to control the system instead of a PC or laptop.
Although I haven't done any Android app development, I've got some reasonable ideas about how to get started. I know even less about iPad development, except that it is more challenging to deal with (especially as we don't have any Macs). However, we can always outsource the actual app development to other companies if need be.
The big challenge is to communicate between the tablet and the embedded system. Ideas include:
Use the existing USB connection. That would be the cheapest and easiest, but most tablets don't have a USB port, and I don't think we could use the FTDI chip anyway.
If we always had internet available, the card could have an Ethernet port and connect to an external server, and the tablet could connect to the external server. But customers don't always have internet connections where this system would be used.
We could put Wifi on the board, and use that between the board and the tablet. But there is not always Wifi available, and when there is there may not be access between nodes on the network. And even then there is the question of getting SSIDs, passwords, etc., into the board.
We could try Bluetooth - but I am not sure that an app can get the kind of direct access to a Bluetooth device that would be needed here.
I can't be the first person to be considering this situation, so I hope that other people have ideas or suggestions.
Thanks,
David