Connecting Arduino Android Wirelessy

Question

I am working with Arduino and Android. I am interested in connecting Arduino (Mega 2560 ADK) to my Android tablet (Nexus 7) wirelessly. The chepaest option is via bluetooth but the communication in not reliable. Now I would like to connect it via WiFi. But I don't want to use WiFi shield on my Arduino.

As Arduino can send the information to my laptop via serial USB connection will it be possible to put this information on my home WiFi network and get it on my Android device by connecting it to the same WiFi network?

Answer 1

Yes, if the laptop and tablet are on the same network communication will be possible. One way to implement this would be to have a client/server setup that communicates over TCP/IP.

The laptop can act as a TCP/IP server and also communicate through the serial interface to your arduino. Many languages will be able to do this, Java, C/C++, Python, whatever you're comfortable with.

The android tablet can then connect to the TCP/IP server as a client and send and receive data through your WiFi. Have a look at the android documentation.

This would a simple solution but for a more permanent solution you could also setup a web server on your laptop, look into the apache webserver. Your tablet would be able to communicate with the web server through http requests. The web server can then start further scripts to send data to the arduino or maintain a serial connection depending on your implementation.