Bluetooth remote control for OpenCPN

[BellaX]

Hi there,

I made a remote control based on bluetooth low energy, sometimes called BLE or BT 4.0. Heart of the rc
is a bt module from Bluegiga (now Silicon labs), the BLE112. Of course the BLE113 can be used as well.

It can connect to Windows 8++, Raspbian Buster and Android Smartphones or Tablets. The remote
connects as HID over GATT and shows up as keyboard service. iOS should work but not tested yet.

As I was not able to manage keyboard and mouse at the same time I simulate the mouse by sending
"unusual" keycodes and used xdotool in the key bindings to move the mouse pointer and simulate mouse clicks.

It works really nice. I have buttons for the most common functions, map panning, zoom, center boat and can
quickly change the screen. The dashboard-button sends 'alt-tab' so I can hop from window to window.

I can switch from panning to mouse mode and have the left and right buttons on hand. This is nice to
answer pop ups or to change settings where a mouse is needed. With the right mouse you can show
the context menu. Very useful sometimes.

From my point of view OpenCPN is unusable without keyboard and mouse. My remote control gives you a
bit keyboard and a bit mouse to the helm. Better than nothing. 

Oh, and I added a milled plastic eyelet and a rope to the enclosure. If you ask me my smartphone
should have one as well. 
Chris

---

I made the prototype using uv exposure and etching at home. If you are interested how this works:
https://www.segeln-forum.de/board194-boo...ndex2.html

Cheers,
Chris

[mgrouch]

I use this one

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0776T8QDC

as a backup.

I've managed to fix touchscreen issues with OpenCPN via twofing and on screen keyboard svkbd


https://bareboat-necessities.github.io/m...uch_screen

Thanks,
--MG

[jaykay]

@BellaX your remote is really stylish and looks super useful! Congratulations! You should be selling these. I fully agree that even with a touchscreen, you do need a keyboard and a mouse, or some other remote control device.

I made an inexpensive wired remote control from an off-the-shelf numpad and mapped the most important OpenCPN keyboard shortcuts to it.

    

The configuration and software used for Raspberry Pi can be found on my blog post about the OpenCPN remote control.

JayKay

[BellaX]

@BellaX your remote is really stylish and looks super useful! Congratulations! You should be selling these. I fully agree that even with a touchscreen, you do need a keyboard and a mouse, or some other remote control device.

I made an inexpensive wired remote control from an off-the-shelf numpad and mapped the most important OpenCPN keyboard shortcuts to it.

    

The configuration and software used for Raspberry Pi can be found on my blog post about the OpenCPN remote control.

JayKay

Thank you @JayKay:

The first idea was to use a cheap IR remote control Chip. The RC was working but I never managed to bring LIRC to work.
Last year I found out that LIRC via GPIO is broken in Raspbian Buster. We successfully tested ir-keymap on a banana-pi 
running sunix but the same does not work for Buster.

Last week I made a small piece of software for another project that needed I2C. So I got the idea to decode the IR-signals
using an 8-Pin PIC12F1822 and let the RPi grab it via I2C. This works very well! Whenever a keycode comes in it pulls an IRQ
line connected to the Pi. The Pi is set up to detect this interrupt and starts a small script to read out one byte only from
the PIC controller.

This means no permanent polling of GPIOs, no problems with task switching, not wasting any processing time. Another
benefit is you can use it with any Arduino or ESP32 or any other microcontroller board that supports I2C.

The pcbs for the IR-Remote and the receiver are in production and will arrive next week!