agroom

A quick background - I'm going to school for Electrical Engineering Tech. A classmate is working on a project where he wants to be able to turn on a coffee maker via BT on a smart phone. He decided on Android and bought a cheap used phone. Unfortunately though, he has little to no experience with programming or smart phones.

I've been an Android user for about 3 years and am one of the better programmers in the class, so he asked for my assistance. I know very little about Android development or working with BT either, but I said I would help look into this for him anyway.

He said he knows how to create the receiver/electronics for the coffee maker, and is just looking for an easy way to broadcast a small BT command from his phone. It sounds like he just needs to be able to broadcast like a byte of data that the receiver can pick-up. The phone does not need to receive any data, pair with the coffee maker, etc. Sorry for my ignorance on BT and if that is not how BT works. I also don't really know what he has planned for the receiver end either.

I'm not opposed to doing a crash-course in app development; however, before I get too involved I thought I'd ask if there's maybe an easy solution. My first thought was the MIT App Inventor, but found out they do not have BT support yet. I also own Tasker, but I'm an extreme novice in that as well. I also spent some time just googling for android apps that might just broadcast data over BT, but also came up blank. Although I think my ignorance on the subject is just restricting my ability to find something.

Would anyone have any suggestions to a simple way to do this or be able to tell me where to begin? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Last edited by agroom; November 15th, 2012 at 10:12 AM.