Cybersecurity: Radio Tilt Control

What it’s about

Control a cyber:bot by tilting a micro:bit!  The controller micro:bit measures tilt with its accelerometer, and sends that information to the cyber:bot with its radio.  The cyber:bot receives the radio transmitted tilt data and uses it to set its wheel speeds.

This tutorial can be approached in two ways:

I just want to tilt-control my cyber:bot!

• Check the Before you start list below to make sure you are ready.
• Do the Radio Tilt Tests section to make sure your controller micro:bit and receiver cyber:bot are communicating data properly.
• Jump down to the Radio Tilt Controlled cyber:bot App at the end of this tutorial.

I want to learn about developing this kind of app and how an accelerometer works, or I’m in a class and it’s required:

• Check the Before you start list below to make sure you are ready.
• Go through the activities sequentially to learn about accelerometer sensing, tilt angle calculations, radio tests, forward/backward control, add stop range, left right control, and adding exception handling.

Before you start

You will need:

• A fully built and tested cyber:bot robot
• One additional micro:bit module (on or off a cyber:bot)
• Two USB A to Micro B cables
• One or more computers with:
• Access to python.microbit.org on a Chrome browser

Complete these lessons first from the cyber:bot Tutorial Series:

• Required
  • Get Started with micro:bit and Python
  • Writing micro:bit programs
  • Add modules to your micro:bit
  • Computer – micro:bit Talk
  • Build your cyber:bot
  • Navigation with the cyber:bot
• Recommended
  • Dictionary Primer
  • Exception Handling Primer
  • Strings & Characters Primer
  • Cybersecurity: Radio Basics
  • Cybersecurity: Radio Data
  • Cybersecurity: Navigation Control from a Keyboard

After you finish

If you go through the tutorials sequentially, you will gain experience with:

• How an accelerometer works
• How sensing axes can be more or less aligned with gravity
• How a capacitive accelerometer detects acceleration and gravity forces
• Trigonometry tricks for calculating tilt angle from accelerometer measurements
• Scaling sensor values for speed/direction control
• Incremental maneuver feature addition
• Using key-value pairs to simplify data exchange between devices in a cyber:bot app.  This was introduced in Cybersecurity: Radio Data