Just an update the bluetooth seemed like a good idea at the time with the options available, but I made a lot of breakthroughs with wifi and finalized the bot to use wifi. I now get over 1Mbps and can get up to 4mbps, there is no need to in most cases though since I max out the camera at 20fps. I will be releasing another article soon.

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As I have moved along with wifi I started to have an enormous desire to allow the wifi to send all of the information into a browser instead of a custom application I write. This way the user simply starts up their browser and points it at the wifi bot and they get a video stream and a robot they can manipulate. From there the same controls and commands you can send with the ZEngine java API you could send over the url to your bot. This will allow developers to use pure javascript or other languages to interface with the bot. But this model does not allow any bluetooth, so I thought to myself what do I do with all of this bluetooth code I have written and this nice system I already have ? It must be useful to someone ? So I decided to split the bot into three, one for bluetooth, one for wifi and one for long range. You can read about it here

http://zonerobotics.com/wordpress/?page_id=314

Long story short I want to finish the hardware and the software by September. So my goal is to get all the bluetooth stuff that I already had working and make it work again and finalize it. The hardware will have support for all three bots but the first version and the software will use the bluetooth modules. This way I can finalize the body and the hardware and have a fun toy and then start long term development on the other bots.

I had big issues with the bluetooth before being inconsistent with the firmware. I would write drivers for one module then order some more and they didnt work the same. A really smart guy from France named Byron has documented how to burn a good or at least consistent version of software onto the HC-05 modules. I have made contact with Byron and he has graciously agreed to help me with the project should I have issues. http://byron76.blogspot.com/

So, for now its full steam ahead finalizing a bluetooth bot, for better or worse !