Talking to an Android phone through Wi-Fi

In this system, the master controller sends its serial data to a laptop through a USB-to-Serial converter.  The laptop is responsible for creating a number of colorful animated displays from this data. Now I am interested to send this same data to an Android phone that can create its own custom displays. This can be done either through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

I want to implement both, by double-splitting the UART Tx line to a RN-XV Wifly Module, and to a BlueSMiRF Bluetooth Modem.

In this post, I will discuss the Wi-Fi route.

The goal is to establish a peer-to-peer adhoc connection between the Wifly module and the phone, and to use UDP packets to keep a low latency in the transmission of live 10 Hz data. Since Android 4.0, it is possible to programmatically configure the phone as an Access Point (AP) visible to nearby Wi-Fi modules (including those integrated in most modern laptops and computers).

There is currently a limitation to this approach (but see UPDATE below!). In creating the AP, the Android system assigns a random SSID and passphrase to it, and it is not possible to edit these values The Wifly module must have an advanced knowledge of these values in order to connect to the phone. So the AP must first be created by the phone, and its details made visible in order to configure the Wifly module.

I have created a simple app tool to assist in this task. It is available on Google Play under the name ‘Wi-Fi P2P Access Point’. I have set up a small fee to refrain people to install it without having a real interest and knowledge of what it is designed for.

With this application, you can create an access point that will live as long as Wi-Fi is enabled on the phone, or until you manually remove it in the app, or until the Android system arbitrarily decides to destroy it to reclaim resources.

Here is a simple way to test if the AP actually exists. After you create an AP, your laptop will automatically list it as an available network, and if you want to connect, you will have to provide the passphrase. Once connected, nothing more happens because there is no data flow on the connection.

Avoid rapidly creating and removing APs without some pause between the commands. The app will become unresponsive and you may have to disable and re-enable Wi-Fi.

In coming posts, as an intermediate step, we will look at:

- how to configure the Wifly module to send GPS data to the phone;

- how to develop a custom app than can display these data.


UPDATE: With Android 4.2.1, the above limitation seems to have disappeared! The SSID and passphrase remain the same when the access point is removed and recreated.