Ubiquitous Mobile Game Development Using Arduino on Android Platform

Abstract

This paper describes the use of Arduino on Android open-source platform in an experimental way to develop a remote control multi-player game in a ubiquitous computing environment. Android mobile is programmed to be a remote control device used to send sockets via Bluetooth network to Arduino microprocessor embedded in a toy car to control movements in all directions along its pathway. We applied the open-source microcontroller Arduino and the Java-Based technology Android in developing a multi-player mobile game in distributed ubiquitous computing, which strongly focuses on the emergence of technologies that embrace android mobile and Arduino open-sources. Our investigation focuses on an extended form of ubiquitous computing which game software developers utilize to develop remote control games for multi-players. We call this study an experimental ubiquitous computing application in which the Arduino embedded in the toy car can sense the color pattern changes with infrared along its pathway and instantaneously send the data via Bluetooth piconet to the connected Android mobile device. In turn, the Android mobile device sends the data to game server via web services on internet. Currently, mobile computing feeds data information into the game server. However, designing real-time ubiquitous mobile control game is still a daunting task and much theoretical and practical research remains to be done to reach the ubiquitous computing era. In this paper, we present the overall architecture and discuss, in detail, the implementation steps taken to create the Arduino and Android based remote control context-aware game. We prepare the client and server codes in ubiquitous computing, providing adaptive routines to handle connection information requests in telecommunication, logging and context formatting and delivery for speedy throughput and context-triggered actions.