Project 2: Mouse and Keyboard control through Android device

Accelerometer and gyrometer are costly. And they were necessary for my master project (the one I mentioned in Last blog) . Spending money to buy them and then a microcontroller for interacting with them would have cost me heavily.

Android <> PC interaction

I knew most of android phones have these sensors in-built. So instead of spending ( around 10k rs) I thought of studying android api , and then building an app which would send sensor data to the computer.

Android was surprisingly easy to learn. Luckily, because we had learned Java in 3^rd semester. I started building small apps and was able to fetch and display sensor data. But then came the difficult part “making a connection to a remote computer”. There are many modes of communication, but I preferred 2 of them Bluetooth and WLAN.

I didn’t have any android phone. I was trying out my apps on Micromax Funbook p275 , a cheap but useful tablet. It didn’t have Bluetooth module, so I had to go with wifi. It took me some time to learn Sockets because I had no freaking idea how computer networks worked.  And yeah Java doesn’t allow sockets to be created on main thread, so I had to learn thread programming too.

I preferred Java on remote server (your PC) because it has a common VM for linux, windows or OSX. 

When I was browsing through Java library, I came across an awesome class ‘Robot’. Its functionality is as cool as its name , It can simulate mouse movement and key presses……..

I already knew ‘making connection with a remote computer’ , ‘sending data’ and Robot class gave me  the idea of controlling my computer with my tablet. I implemented it , and here’s the output..

I continued working on this project for 2-3 months and added features like automatic server detection (requires UDP broadcasting), Bluetooth support and what not!